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THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THINKING AS A SCIENCE 

"Mr. Hazlitt's suggestions, hints and prescrip- 
tions for efficient thinking are so sound, so lucid and 
so convincing that we might wish for their universal 
dissemination. If they were generally accepted 
and practised, we should have something like an 
intellectual revolution. — " The Tribune (New York). 

"Altogether a valuable book for both student 
and layman, helpful, provocative of thinking." — 
The Living Age. 

"Helpful in developing the power of concentration 
and in showing methods of reasoning." — The New 
York Evening Post. 

"The book should increase any one's ability to 
think clearly, logically and to the point." — Phila- 
delphia Telegraph. 



E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



THE WAY TO 

WILL-POWER 

By 

HENRY HAZLITT 

Author of "Thinking as a Science" 




' The strength of your life is measured by the strength of 
your will." — Henry Van Dyke. 



NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright 1922 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 



Printed in the United Stairs of Am erica 

MM -2 »^22 
©CI.A661496 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I A Revelation i 

II The Intellect as a Valet 5 

III The Price One Pays 15 

IV Old Bottles for the New Wine .... 20 

V Resolutions Made and Resolutions 

Kept 32 

VI Success and the Capital S ...... 41 

VII The Scale of Values ....... 46 

VIII Controlling One's Thoughts 55 

IX The Omnipresence of Habit 63 

X The Alteration of Habit 74 

XI Will and the Psychoanalysts .... 84 

XII Concentration 109 

Xllf A Program of Work 120 

XIV The Daily Challenge ....... 127 

XV Second and Third Winds 136 

XVI Moral Courage . 153 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

I 

A REVELATION 

YOU have seen the advertisements. The lion 
and the man are facing each other; the man 
upstanding, hands clenched, his look defiant and 
terrible; the lion crouching. Who will win? The 
man, without doubt. He has what the beast lacks, 
Will-Power. 

And at the bottom of the page is the triangular 
clipping which you cut out and send for the book 
on how to acquire it. 

Or perhaps the advertisement promises you a 
$10,000 a year position. Nothing less than $10,000 
a year seems capable of attracting the present-day 
reader of twenty-cent magazines. And those posi- 
tions, one learns, are reserved for the men of Will- 
Power (not forgetting the capitals). 

The advertisements betray bizarre ideas about 

the will and will-power. Any one who has the 

remotest notion of psychology might be led from 

them to suspect the advertised course. But the 

l 



2 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

advertisements reflect not alone the advertiser's 
ideas, but the ideas of the plain man. They are 
written to catch the plain man's eye, and they do 
catch his eye, else how account for their persistence, 
their enlargement, and their multiplication, notwith- 
standing the notorious expensiveness of adver- 
tising? 

Now I am about to reveal a profound secret 
about the will. The revelation will cause a good 
deal of shock and disappointment and a bedlam of 
protest. However, I derive courage to meet the 
protest because I have an imposing body of psy- 
chologic opinion behind me. I have behind me 
most of the reputable psychologic opinion since 
Herbert Spencer. And so here it is : 

The will does not exist. 

I repeat it, lest you fancy there has been a mis- 
print. There is no such thing as the will. Nor 
such a thing as will-power. These are merely con- 
venient words. 

Now when a man denies the existence of the will 
he is on dangerous ground. It is as if he were to 
deny the existence of the tomato. Yet I do deny 
that the will exists, in anything like the same sense 
that the tomato exists. The tomato is a definite 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 3 

entity. You can pick it up, handle it, feel it, or 
throw it at the person who denies its existence. 
And this evidence of reality may convince him. But 
I am not so crude nor so fatuous as to deny the 
existence of the will simply because you cannot 
feel it on taste it. I do not deny it simply because 
it is not material and tangible. I deny it because it 
is not even spiritual. The plain man's conception 
of the will is utterly and grotesquely wrong, and 
he must be shaken from it violently. 

The popular conception seems to be that the 
Creator, having decided that a man might want to 
have a brain to use upon occasion, bethought Him- 
self about the ingredients, and dropped in first a 
memory, then an imagination, then a will, and then 
a power to reason. Though popular conception is 
vague on the details, it is probable that the last was 
a small parcel, wrapped in prejudices to protect it 
from strain. 

But the Creator could have left out the will, and 
no one would have been the wiser. Proof of it is 
that so few of us were. It was only recently that 
psychologists began to suspect its absence. 

You are making a gesture of impatience. "This 
is a little too stiff," you say. "There is a limit 
to which you can impose on me, I know when a 



4 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

man shows a will, and when he doesn't. I have 
met strong-willed men, and I have met weak-willed 
men, and I know the difference when I see it." 

For your remonstrance I have the greatest 
respect. And I will now proceed to give heed to it. 



II 



THE INTELLECT AS A VALET 

T TAVING given some hint of what the will is 
■*■ ■*■ not, it is now my pleasant duty to tell what it 
is. This may best be done by illustration. 

You resolve to abolish late nights. Two nights 
out a week will be your limit. No night out later 
than midnight. It doesn't pay. A man loses sleep. 
He hurts his health. He isn't as fresh as he ought 
to be for work. He is just frittering his time 
away, and getting nowhere, and not improving 
himself evenings, and it's expensive, and — 

So you resolve to cut it out. With a free con- 
science you make your two engagements for the 
coming week. About Monday noon Jones drops 
around at the office. There is a little game of 
poker toward some night that week when they 
can get the crowd together. Now poker is marvel- 
ously fascinating. You haven't seen the boys for 
a long time. And you hate to lie to Jones, and 
tell him all your nights are occupied, for such a 



6 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

little reason. And you are ashamed to tell him 
the truth. That you have resolved to go out only 
two nights a week, come what may, might strike 
Jones as deliciously funny. He might tell the 
boys, who also have a sense of humor. And there 
is the possibility that Jones might be offended. 
wSo you look straight before you, undecided for a 
minute or two, or you make feeble excuses (not 
your real ones) which are easily overridden by 
Jones, and you end by thinking to yourself that 
you will not count this week, or that you will make 
up for it the week after . . . And your dis- 
honor is complete. 

Let us analyze this degrading incident. Man is 
a bundle of desires. He desires this, and that, 
and something else again. And the world is so 
constituted that, in nearly every instance, one 
desire cannot be attained save at the sacrifice of 
some other. This provoking state of affairs was 
long ago crystallized in the phrase that you cannot 
eat your cake and have it too. More broadly, it 
may be expressed in the phrase that everything 
we desire has its price. The price of a cake is 
a dollar; the price of keeping your dollar is the 
loss of a cake. 

This illuminating truth does not stop at the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 7 

grossly material things, at the things whose prices 
can be measured in money. It extends through- 
out the spiritual universe. The price of earning 
$2 extra a day may be working an extra hour a 
day; which may be conceived either as the pain 
of an extra hour's work or as the loss of an hour's 
leisure. Conversely, the price of an hour's extra 
leisure a day is $2 a day. 

$Ve are now coming to grips with our actual 
case. The price of staying out late at night is 
sleepy health, efficiency at business, money, self- 
improvement. That is, these are the things that 
the man must pay, lose, sacrifice, in order that he 
may stay out late at night. Conversely, the price 
of sleep, health, efficiency at business, money, 
self -improvement, is the pleasure of staying out 
late at night that one gives up. 

We have taken a devious course to arrive at 
our conclusion, yet we must deviate a little further 
before we come back. We must consider the 
Intellect. For centuries we have glorified the 
intellect; we have put wreaths upon its head and 
sung its praises. Which was quite absurd. For 
a man's intellect is a helpless, powerless sort of 
thing, a mere instrument, a tool, a subordinate, 
which the desires boss around. It does the bidding 



8 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

of the desire that shouts the loudest. You may 
call this a libel on the intellect. You perhaps 
maintain the traditional view that the intellect 
directs the desires. 

But reflect. You engage daily in more or less 
unpleasant tasks for eight hours; you work. It is 
your desire for bread and soup and cafe parfait, 
for an overcoat, an apartment, and theatres and 
golf, that drives you there. You may protest that 
you enjoy your work. I shall not gainsay you. 
In either case, it is your desires that are dictating 
your action. The intellect merely obeys. If it is 
a good intellect, its owner may count himself for- 
tunate. It will better able to carry out the 
orders of its bo the desires; it will satisfy 
them more, and > will satisfy more of them. 
The intellect may, and often docs, pick the road 
to a given place; the desires always dictate the 
designation. To multiply figures, the intellect is 
the steering gear, the desires are the engine; the 
intellect is the pilot, the desires are the breeze. 

We are now ready to return to our immediate 
subject. When a man is engaged in what we call 
making a decision, the intellect may be thought 
to occupy a place of greater dignity. It may be 
imaged as acting as a judge between conflicting 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 9 

desires. But the position of the intellect is in 
reality one of profound humiliation. In deciding 
between desires, it is actually trying to make up 
its mind which desire is the stronger. It feels 
their muscles, so to speak. And it obeys the 
desire with the hardest biceps. 

Now every decision is not merely a selection 
from among desires. One desire may be so over- 
powering that all others cringe before it; they 
are merely brushed out of the way. The function 
of the intellect, then, in making a decision, is to 
select from alternative courses the one which 
most promises to fulfill this supreme desire. 

I can fancy your rebelling al this point, if, in 
fact, you have not done so lonf 3 ago. "What you 
say may be all very true about some people," I 
can hear, ^dii saying, "but suppose I refuse to 
allow my intellect to be bullied around in this 
shameless manner? Suppose I choose to have my 
intellect snap its fingers at all my desires, and say 
'Hereafter / will be master?' What becomes of 
all your fine analysis then?" 

This question, my dear sir, is not so formidable 
as it looks. What it would amount to, if you 
succeeded in carrying out your magnificent defiance, 
or rather, if you succeeded in thinking you had, 



10 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

would be that your desire (note the word) your 
desire to have your intellect master would over- 
come other desires or impulses, recognized by your 
intellect as such, which arose transiently from 
moment to moment. You would act only on the 
desires which your intellect happened to approve 
of; but that is merely another way of saying that 
your desire to act on the principles of common 
sense had overcome all other desires. 

For mark. There is nothing immoral in desires 
per se. There are good desires as well as evil. 
There are spiritual desires as well as material. 
There are desires to help others, to spread cheer- 
fulness, to protect one's health, to live in modera- 
tion, to feel satisfied with one's lot, to "succeed'' 
in life, to go to Heaven, to feel the happiness that 
virtue gives. And these desires may be just as 
powerful as selfish desires, or as a craving for tran- 
sient sensual pleasures. Bernard Shaw says some- 
where that real goodness is nothing but the self- 
indulgence of a good man. 

Unfortunately, the word "desire,'' taken by it- 
self, has come in popular usage to have a restricted, 
a sensual, an evil meaning. Popular usage has 
perverted it just as it has perverted the word 
"pleasure." which arouses such endless confusion 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 11 

of thought in ethical argument. I verily believe 
that could a man be brought to think of the word 
"desire" always in its true and broadest meaning, 
his aversion to the truth that the desires over-lord 
the intellect would be completely removed. 

For as a fact, I have greatly understated the pre- 
dominance of the desires as compared with the 
intellect. The very existence of the intellect depends 
up6n the desires. Unless a man have desires, he 
will have no intellect. Or rather, he will never 
develop it and never use it, which is much the 
same thing. Thinking is problem solving. It 
arises from thwarted purposes. If we have no 
desires, we can have no purposes, and hence noth- 
ing to thwart. Thinking may arise as an attempt 
to solve something bearing on our immediate per- 
sonal welfare, or on the welfare of our family or 
our city, or on the welfare of mankind; it may 
arise from the love of prestige and applause or 
from sheer intellectual curiosity. In any case, 
desire of some kind is the motivating force. 

A great difficulty yet remains. You may admit 
that the intellect is a servant and not a master. 
But not that it is the servant of your desires. "It 
is the servant of Me," you say. "It is the servant 
of My Will." These are two • distinct, perhaps 



12 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

contradictory, assertions. Let us consider the first. 
Now let me ask. What are you? You are noth- 
ing but a total. Take away your body, take away 
your physical brain, take away your intellect, your 
desires, your memory, your imagination, take away, 
I say, all the parts and attributes of you, and there 
is nothing left. That should be obvious, so obvious 
that I almost blush to state it. Whenever you 
speak of Me, or I, or You, you are speaking now 
of one part or attribute of yourself, now of another. 
You say, "I intend to do so-and-so," — meaning 
that a certain desire within you is going to make the 
rest of you do so-and-so. You say, "I am run- 
ning," — meaning that your legs are running, carry- 
ing the rest of your body and your brain along 
with them. You say, "I am thinking," — meaning 
that your intellect is thinking. Your knees aren't 
thinking; your feet aren't thinking; your teeth 
aren't thinking. Only your intellect. In any case, 
when you refer to I, you are referring now to one 
part of yourself, now to another; and yet, such 
is the confusion of thought, that because you give 
the same name now to one part and now to another, 
you fancy that the word "1" refers to som 
distinct from any of these, something in addition, 
something separable from the parts that comp 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 13 

But when you are talking of "I" in the fore- 
going sense, you are usually referring to your Will, 
and it is this conception that we must now consider. 
The brain, as previously intimated, is a receptacle 
full of conflicting desires. (All desires are not 
ever-present, but that is not a point we need con- 
sider now.) For certain periods — it may be only 
for a moment, perhaps for a day, possibly for 
half a lifetime — a certain desire will predominate. 
That desire, for just as long as it predominates, 
will determine action. For as long as it predom- 
inates and determines action, that desire constitutes 
your will. It is what you desire to do, what you 
want to do, what you will to do. 

But one desire may predominate for one hour, 
and another the next. Just now you may wish 
to sit home for the evening and improve your mind. 
That is your will. After reading this a few 
minutes you may become bored (I am not blaming 
you), and may decide to call up your friends and 
play bridge for the evening. That is also your 
will. 

And here we come to the great confusion. These 
desires, which are constantly gaining individual 
supremacy and losing it, which are constantly over- 
throwing and dethroning each other like presidents 



14 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

in a South American republic, are each of them 
mere temporary holders of power. Yet we give 
a permanent name to them. We call one desire 
the will, and we call the next desire the will. And 
so we think that the will is something in addition 
to these separate desires. If we were to say that 
Warren G. Harding kissed Mrs. Harding, and then 
were to add that the President of the United States 
also kissed Mrs. Harding, the confusion between 
words and things would be obvious. The President 
of the United States we know to be only another 
name for Harding. It is merely a permanent name 
for the different temporary holders of that power- 
ful office, all of different natures. So with the 
mind. The will is merely a name for the desire 
that happens to hold temporary power. Take away 
all desires, and there remains no will. 



Ill 



THE PRICE ONE PAYS 



T CAN fancy that you are becoming somewhat 
-^ weary. "What is the sense of this fellow's 
always harping on the same thing," you may say. 
"Here he has been going on for two chapters with 
his precious analysis, repeating himself, insisting, 
emphasizing, underestimating my intelligence, and 
after I have his point, and he has made himself 
clear, he keeps on talking. I picked up his book 
under the impression that it might help me to 
acquire more will-power, and here he is trying to 
jam a psychological treatise down my throat." 

Now I admit the seeming justice of this. But 
my point is vital. Before we can acquire will- 
power, we must first of all know what we are talk- 
ing about. An amazing amount of cant and non- 
sense is written about the will. I have seen a book 
on Will-Power so thick and formidable that the 
chairs creaked when you put it upon them, and it 
was vitiated and full of absurdities from the first 



16 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

page to the last, simply because the author had not 
the remotest conception of what the will is. Occa- 
sionally there was a little sense, because occasionally 
the writer caught glimpses of the truth, as a man 
must in so many pages. But we cannot afford to 
catch only glimpses. We must know what w T e are 
talking about all the time, not merely in moments 
of absent-mindedness. My point, I repeat, is vital. 
I am taking no risks with it. 

Having approached a true conception of the will, 
we are prepared to go a step farther, and to find 
what we mean by the phrase "Will-Power." This 
is not difficult. It resolves itself into a question 
of time. When we say a man has will-power, we 
mean that he has a certain desire which persists 
and predominates for a comparatively long period. 
It is not being constantly dethroned by a multitude 
of other desires. Either the other desires are not 
strong enough, or it is too strong for them (which, 
as we shall see later, is more than a mere verbal 
distinction) ; and if perchance this desire is forced 
to abdicate for a little while, which may sometimes 
happen with the strongest-willed persons, it quickly 
throws out the usurping desire and reigns again. 

This dominant desire is usually a wish for some- 
thing remote. The man who obeys it is setting 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 17 

the expected advantage of the future against the 
supposed advantages of the present. He will not 
eat an extra slice of that delicious pie, for he knows 
that if he did he would two hours later be suffer- 
ing the agonies of indigestion. He will not gaze 
at that pretty girl on the subway seat opposite, for 
he has embarked upon the noble enterprise of im- 
proving his mind; he has set aside his trip to 
work in the mornings for concentration on some 
serious subject; he will not be distracted. Or he 
will stay late at the office; he will take his work 
home with him; he will whip his brain on when 
it is tired; he will shorten his holidays, eliminate 
social enjoyments and endanger his health, for he 
has resolved upon Success in Life. 

Will-Power, then, may be defined as the ability 
to keep a remote desire so vividly in mind that 
immediate desires which interfere with it are not 
gratified. 

Understand me, I pass no moral judgment on 
the will per se. I do not condemn it, neither do I 
praise. It may be evil as well as good. A man 
may devote years to avenging himself upon another. 
He may put up with inconveniences ; endure priva- 
tion; submit to insults, humiliation, and risks of 
exposure, all of which he could avoid if he would 



18 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

consent to give up his aim. Napoleon consecrated 
his colossal will to the once glorious and now dis- 
credited occupation of trying to conquer the world. 

But will does imply thought of the future. 
It is ready, if need be, to sacrifice the present to 
the future. And that is one of the great dis- 
tinguishing marks between the civilized man and 
the savage. The savage did not save; he did not 
plant crops; he did not provide for old age. He 
did not even set aside food for the next day. When 
he got a piece of meat, he gorged himself, until 
he slept. He died 3-oung. 

A firmer grasp of the true idea of will-power 
is attainable if one is acquainted with some of the 
distinctions of political economy. The economist 
differentiates between "desire" and "demand." 
When the layman talks of the demand for auto- 
mobiles, he thinks usually of the desire for auto- 
mobiles. The economist will not tolerate such 
looseness. A beggar may genuinely desire a Rolls- 
Royce car, but that does not concern the manu- 
facturer. It does not constitute part of the demand 
that the manufacturer must supply. He is inter- 
ested only in the folk who can afford to pay for 
Rolls-Royce cars. And it is not only essential 
that the people who can afford a Rolls-Rovce shall 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 19 

desire it, but they must desire it so much that they 
are willing to pay the price for it. 

Now we are ready to apply this economic defini- 
tion to the will. After nineteen pages of theory, 
exegesis and preparation, we are able to lay down 
the first rule for the aspirant for will-power. It is 
a very important rule, and, indeed, possibly covers 
most of the subject : 

Before you make any formal resolution what- 
soever, make certain that you genuinely desire to 
carry it out. Let there be no doubt that the end 
you have in view is so desirable or advantageous 
that it will outweigh all desires or advantages or 
all other ends that are likely to have to be fore- 
gone or abandoned in order to attain it. In short, 
be sure you are willing to pay the price. 

This rule is the corner-stone. Its importance 
will become more and more appreciated as we go on. 



IV 



OLD BOTTLES FOR THE NEW WINE 

HAVING made myself satisfactorily clear, I 
am now disposed to become more amiable 
and conciliatory. Having demolished (I hope) 
popular misconceptions of the will and the intellect 
by gunpowder charges of the truth, and having 
erected a new edifice in place of the old, vague, 
and misleading one, I am willing to add a few 
bricks from the old building. In short, I am pre- 
pared to make concessions. It is probably quite 
wise and helpful to do this, because it causes less 
confusion and less irritation to talk, wherever 
possible, in terms of established conceptions than 
in terms of conceptions to which the reader is 
unaccustomed. This is all the more to be desired 
when the old conception has some partial justifica- 
tion, and when, though loosely lumping different 
things under one name, it none the less, by so doing, 
effects an economy of thought and of language. 
I have said, for instance, that there is no such 
20 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 21 

thing as the will considered as an entity, that it is 
simply a name we give first to one desire and then 
to another. But by way of setting off those desires 
which we commonly call "the will" from those 
desires which "the will" opposes, I have said that 
the will, in general, represents desires for remote, 
as opposed to immediate, gratifications. Yet we 
may generalize still further. As long as we keep 
in the background of our minds that the will is 
really an abstraction, there is no harm in speaking 
of it a good part of the time as if it were an 
entity; and insofar as it can be said to represent 
a definite and permanent entity, the will may be 
defined as our desire to be a certain sort of 
character. This is still a desire, you see, and it is 
still an abstraction; for our desire to be a certain 
sort of character may mean at one moment a desire 
to be honest, at another moment a desire not to get 
drunk, and at still another moment a desire to con- 
centrate on something. 

When we commonly speak of the will, and think 
of it as if it were a definite concrete thing, it is this 
desire to be a certain sort of character, I think, 
that we commonly have in mind. When popular 
language says that a man is the slave of his desires, 
it means that he acts upon the cravings and impulses 



22 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

that from time to time arise, though in retrospect 
he will know that such actions would never be done 
by the kind of character he wants to be. When 
popular language says that a man is the master 
of his own desires, that he holds them in leash 
and under his control, it means that this desire to 
be a certain kind of character is at all times vivid 
and powerful enough to be acted upon in prefer- 
ence to any other fleeting or recurrent desire that 
may beckon him. 

And it is, on the whole, rather well that popular 
language has this conception imbedded in it. For 
actions and decisions which would otherwise seem 
trivial are made by it to seem large and significant. 
It may not seem a matter of importance whether 
you take this particular drink or not, or whether 
you cheat the car-conductor out of this particular 
five-cent piece. But if you look upon the non- 
performance of this little act as your ability to 
refuse to yield to a particular impulse, and if your 
ability to refuse to yield to this particular impulse 
becomes in your mind a challenge to and a test of 
your entire character, you have thrown into the scale 
a mighty force to ensure your taking the right 
action. 

If we accept the definition of will as the desire 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 23 

to be a certain kind of character, then it can be 
seen to be a matter of the highest importance just 
what kind of character you desire to be. A man 
may have a strong will but low ideals, or he may 
have high ideals and a weak will. A man ought 
to make two demands of his ideals : first that they 
be high enough, and second that they be his own. 

If a man really and truly desires to be a roue or 
a pickpocket, if this be his ideal, and if his conduct 
conforms absolutely with his principles, there is 
assuredly no fault to be found with his will. He 
may firmly put aside all distractions and conquer 
every good and noble temptation, in order to be a 
pickpocket or a roue. But society asks something 
more of him than strength of will. It asks that 
his ideals be socially beneficial. And even more 
may be required. It may be asked that a man put 
his ideals so high that it is difficult to reach them. 
As Browning has expressed it, "A man's reach 
should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" 
A man with lenient and unexacting ideals may be 
a tolerable character; he can never be a great one. 

The demand that a man's ideals should be his 
own is one more difficult to comply with. It means 
he must not accept his moral canons and standards 
unquestioningly from the community. It means 



24 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

that he must not be afraid of "not doing what 
everybody else does" or of "doing what nobody 
else does." It means that he must not be a mere 
mimic or a sheep. He must think for himself. He 
must examine for himself the grounds of right 
and wrong, and not let the principles upon which 
his life is conducted be laid down for him merely 
by other people's opinions. He must not be afraid 
of criticism if he feels in his own heart that he is 
right. This is an exacting ideal. It requires the 
highest moral courage. 

A man who lives up to this ideal may be a 
"dangerous" character. But we are not now dis- 
cussing ethics, per se, but only will-power. He is 
the strong character, the great character. He may 
be a Tolstoy or a Nietzsche or a Eugene Debs ; but 
he is a law unto himself. We may think his ethical 
ideas mistaken, and mistaken they may be; but 
we cannot but admire the strength of character 
which leads him to act them out in spite of social 
opposition. If the strength be sometimes mis- 
directed, that is unfortunate; but the important 
thing, from our present standpoint, is whether it 
is there. 

This reference to "the strong character." recalls 
a pronouncement by John Stuart Mill in his essay 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 25 

on Liberty. "It is not," he says, "because men's 
desires are strong that they act ill; it is because 
their consciences are weak." 

This aphorism must first be analyzed in terms 
of our new conception of the will. A man's "con- 
science" is simply that group of desires to act 
socially, usefully, morally, conventionally, to secure 
the good opinion of his fellow men, or not to fall 
in his own estimation, not to offend or to give 
anger or sorrow to his God, or it may represent 
his desire to forward any other more ultimate end, 
to which the gratification of the immediate impulse 
or desire would be opposed. 

If the belief that Mill is contradicting with his 
dictum is a half-truth, so, too, is his own state- 
ment. It is not the "conscience" in itself, nor the 
"evil" desires in themselves, that ultimately count; 
it is the relation of the one to the other. The 
stronger his desires, the stronger his conscience, 
or counter-desires, must be ; the weaker his desires, 
the less need he has for a strong conscience. 

But we usually, and rightly, regard the man with 
the stronger conscience as the stronger and more 
admirable character. We admire far more the man 
who has a violent craving for drink, but neverthe- 
less fights it down, than we do the man who refrains 



26 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

from drinking, but has no great liking for it any- 
way. Their outward action may be the same, so 
far as its effect on themselves or society is con- 
cerned; but our untrained and unsophisticated 
judgments are right in attaching the importance 
they do to the inward struggle. For the weak man 
who refrains from drinking may not refrain from 
other actions just as personally or socially injurious 
that he has a greater desire for; whereas the man 
with the stronger conscience, who has been able to 
fight this desire in this case, may be depended upon 
to fight lesser desires more easily. 

We all know the habit that many mothers have 
of holding up some little mollycoddle as a model 
to their boy : "You never see Clarence do that !" 
And we sympathize with the boy's contempt : "Ah, 
him! He couldn't be bad!" A man who is good 
from docility, and not from stern self-control, has 
no character. 

Mill recognizes this distinction, and in the passage 
following the sentence of his I have quoted, states 
powerfully the case for the man with stronger 
impulses : "There is no natural connection between 
strong impulses and a weak conscience. The 
natural connection is the other way. To say that 
one person's desires and feelings are stronger and 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 27 

more various than those of another, is merely to 
say that he has more of the raw material of human 
nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more 
evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses 
are but another name for energy. Energy may be 
turned to bad uses; but more good may always be 
made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent 
and impassive one. Those who have most natural 
feeling, are always those whose cultivated feelings 
may be made the strongest. The same strong sus- 
ceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid 
and powerful are also the source from whence are 
generated the most passionate love of virtue, and 
the sternest self-control," 

I began this chapter with one concession to the 
older and more habitual way of looking at things, 
and I shall end it with another. The first had to 
do with the will, and this has to do with the intel- 
lect. I have said that the intellect is a mere valet 
to the desires, and I have made a good many other 
disparaging remarks about it. But I can fancy that 
you were left not only unconvinced, but angry. I 
can fancy someone's' having said, while reading 
those remarks of mine : "My desires are determined 
by my intellect. A man's desires are not the desires 



28 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

of a rabbit. I desire to read Shakespeare and 
Schopenhauer; I actually prefer it to spending my 
evenings in a poolroom or with some pretty female 
thing. Has not my intellect formed my desires? 
Has not it dictated them? What sort of flapdoodle 
are you trying to tell me?*' 

Now before such an assault I am humble, and 
retreat with a magnanimous gesture. It is strictly 
true that the desires and the intellect cannot be 
separated. They interact. Our desires may orig- 
inally determine the direction of our intellectual 
interests, but once our intellectual interests have 
taken a certain turn, they may awaken new desires, 
and abandon old ones. The reading of Nietzsche 
may change a man's ideals and aims in life. A 
desire for a life of study may suddenly turn into a 
desire for a life of "action." 

We have defined will as the desire to become a 
certain sort of character. We have seen that, at 
critical moments, when the craving to do a certain 
thing threatens, like a great tidal wave, to sweep 
us helpless before it, it is this desire to become a 
certain sort of character which throws its weight 
in the scale with the other weaker desires to balance 
us; it is this desire which stands like a rock to 
cling to until the torrent has spent its force. It, 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 29 

too, may be swept away at times. But when it is, 
we know that it has not been strong enough. It is 
a warning that the breakwater has been too low 
and too weak. We must build it higher and 
stronger. We must strengthen this desire to be- 
come a certain sort of character. 

The ideal that we actually form will depend upon 
our parents, our religion, our associates, our read- 
ing, our thinking, the traditions of the nation and 
the age in which we live. Many of these elements 
are intellectual, and to the extent that these deter- 
mine our ideals, they determine part of our desires. 

But even here we cannot say that the intellect 
creates our desires. Rather, it transforms them. 
They exist congenitally in the form of raw mate- 
rials; or more strictly, they exist as a country's 
"natural resources" exist, waiting to be worked up 
by our environment and our intellect (itself shaped 
by environment) into the finished product. Prac- 
tically all men are born with the sexual instinct. 
But though this particular instinct, in its raw state, 
may be present in equal degrees in three men, 
environment, training and intellect may so shape 
this raw material that the first man may elect to 
marry and lead a normal sexual life, the second 
may launch forth as a roue, and the third may enter 



30 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

and abide by the vows of the priesthood. Similarly, 
the pugnacious instinct, which makes dogs fight 
and men go to war, may also, through environment 
and the intellect, be discharged through the channels 
of football or a philosophical controversy. It is 
the same with gregariousness, or any other instinct. 
These are the materials; the desires the finished 
products. 

But thougn the intellect can control the finished 
product, it cannot control the raw materials. One 
cannot lose an inborn instinct by thinking; one 
cannot create one by thinking. In this respect the 
intellect bears the same relation to the instincts as 
man bears to matter. He can transform it, beautify 
it, give it value, turn it to his purposes; but he 
cannot create it and he cannot destroy it. 

And, if we are to consider this question in a truly 
philosophic, not to say a metaphysical manner, I 
may as well confess right here that in talking of 
"desires" and "the intellect" I have been doing a 
somewhat dubious thing. Perhaps the more philo- 
sophic view is that at times the whole man desires, 
and at times he thinks; but the one process is never 
entirely absent from the other. When I deal with 
this process, I deal with it rather crudely, making 
abstractions, treating abstractions as entities, hypo- 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 31 

statizing them, making verbs into nouns. A man 
desires something, and I speak of "the desires"; 
he thinks something, and I speak of "the intellect." 
In doing this, I am merely following common 
usage; and, indeed, the conceptions imbedded in 
our very language practically compel me to adopt 
this usage if I am to prevent myself from becom- 
ing utterly obscure and transcendental. As this is 
supposed to be a practical manual, not a philosophic 
treatise, there will be no harm in continuing to 
talk in terms of these common conceptions. But I 
enter this qualification to ward off irrelevant attacks. 
I shall try to change the common conceptions of 
the nature and relations of "the will" and "the 
intellect" only insofar as I think it needful to 
change them for practical purposes. 

And now, having presented my apologies and con- 
cessions, we can have done with this everlasting 
theorizing, and come to practical cases. 



RESOLUTIONS MADE AND RESOLUTIONS KEPT 

HP HE trouble with the average man is not that he 
-*- neglects to make resolutions. The trouble is 
that he makes far too many resolutions. Making 
resolutions is sometimes his principal daily occu- 
pation. He is forever forgetting or breaking 
them, and that is why he has to make them all 
over again. 

You, O reader, have probably been through this 
experience, so often that you dislike to be reminded 
of it. It is probably your consciousness of past 
events that has tempted you to read this book. 
Now there is something to be said for you. You 
realize your imperfections. You are splendidly 
dissatisfied with your present habits, your present 
mode of living, your present station in life. You 
say to yourself, "This will never do." You see 
things as they would be if you could get up earlier 
in the morning, if you could break that absurd 
habit of setting your alarm clock for seven, getting 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 33 

up, shutting it off, going back to bed with the 
honest intention of taking just a five minutes' 
snooze, and not waking up until quarter to eight. 
Ridiculous as it is, the habit repeats itself morn- 
ing after morning. You jump with a start; you 
have a wild notion that the alarm clock has played 
a trick on you; you dress in six minutes, shave in 
four, bolt your breakfast, make some excited, irri- 
tated, unkind remarks to your wife, start for the 
station or the street car like a man in a walking 
race, break into a run, curse the line waiting for 
tickets, and when you are finally aboard your 
train, which trudges along and loiters around 
stations as if all eternity were before it, you say to 
yourself, "This will never do." 

In that ride on the train to your office, you see 
things as they might be. You see yourself getting 
up at seven, dressing at your leisure, eating break- 
fast in an expansive mood; no friction; no irrita- 
tion; no squabbles with friend wife; no dreadful 
fear that you are going to miss your train, or that 
somebody will look first at you, at the clock, and 
then at you as you come in the office. In that ride 
on the train you have glimpsed perfection. And 
you make a tremendous resolution. "This thing 
has been going on long enough. It's preposterous. 



34 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

It has got to stop. Tomorrow I will get up at 
seven." 

And what happens?. Well, you arrive at the 
office and there are a number of things to occupy 
attention; your resolution, temporarily, drops out 
of mind. Jones (my chief illustrative standby) 
wanders in and suggests his little game of poker 
that night. It is conceivable that you are not 
ashamed to protest, and that you indicate your new 
desire to keep early hours. Jones assures you it 
won't be long; just a hand or two. You go. You 
arrive home at 1 :30, having had, in the main, an 
evening not too stupid, but inwardly grumbling 
that you got back so late, or that somehow you 
couldn't have spent five hours at Jones's house and 
still have arrived home two hours after you left 
home. You go to bed ; you sleep . . . The alarm 
rings. Seven o'clock! You get up, automatically, 
in a daze, angry and resentful against the alarm 
that you yourself have set. You shut it off. You 
turn back toward the bed, like a marionette, with- 
out consciousness of a decision or of any thought 
whatever; you retrace your steps; you are about 
to get into bed again; a vague recollection of yes- 
terday's resolution (and perhaps also it is the 
resolution of the day before yesterday and of the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 35 

day before that) flits uneasily across your mind. 
But you are sleepy; sleep is indispensable; the 
trouble yesterday was not that you went back to 
bed, but that you overslept when you got there; 
just a five minute snooze . . . You awake. Ten 
minutes to eight! Impossible! And in the midst 
of your five-minute dress, and your three-and-a- 
half minute shave, and your bolted breakfast, you 
still have a corner of your mind that is reflecting 
on' what an ass you have been, and making a 
resolution that this must be stopped. And so on, 
as one day follows another. 

The example is chosen at random. It is not an 
extreme example. It is not the most powerful I 
could have selected. But it suffices to illustrate 
my point. The trouble is that even in your 
moments on the train you never sufficiently con- 
vinced yourself that you really wanted to get up 
and stay up when the alarm rang. At nine o'clock 
in the morning, on your way to work, you have 
been thinking only of one side of the case; and 
at seven o'clock the next morning you have been 
thinking only of the other side. 

Understand me, I am not saying that it would 
be to your advantage to make that resolve on the 
train. I do not contend that it would be better to 



36 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

get up at seven and take your time than to get up 
at quarter to eight and hurry. You are the judge 
of that. I disclaim any moral attitude whatever. 
But I insist that if you do make a resolve it should 
be carried out. There should be never an excep- 
tion. This point is supreme. To make a resolve 
and break it is demoralizing. Though not a single 
other soul on earth should know it, though God 
himself should not know, you would know it. 
Y'ou would have to confess your failure to your- 
self. To break a resolve is to undermine your 
self-respect. To break a resolve is to lose faith in 
yourself. It shakes your confidence that you can 
keep any other. The next time you become sud- 
denly disgusted with any action or habit, and you 
clench your teeth and your left fist, and are just 
about to drive your left fist into the open palm of 
your right, and say to yourself, "The next time 
I — " you are apt to stop short and think of your 
previous failure, and the bitter irony of it all may 
rush over you. You start at the very beginning 
with an unwholesome doubt of whether you are 
going to keep your resolve. And when self- 
respect and self-faith are gone, nothing else is 
worth while. But with every resolution kept, be 
it never so small a resolution, your faith in your- 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 37 

self grows. The keeping of the next resolution 
becomes tremendously easier. Will-power comes 
into its inheritance. 

The moral of all this is that you should make 
fewer resolutions and keep more. The foolish 
resolution is the resolution made in a moment of 
passion and self-disgust. It is well that you 
should have such moments. It is of such moments 
that great achievements are born. But before you 
make a resolve that you seriously mean to execute, 
look at it coldly and completely. Think not alone 
of the benefits of keeping it, but of the disad- 
vantages. If you have been lying in bed until 
quarter to eight, you have not been doing so unless 
there were some advantages in lying in bed until 
quarter to eight. Consider these advantages in the 
moment of your resolve. Do not pass them over 
in contempt. Weigh them at their full value. 
Measure the sacrifice of forsaking them. Balance 
it against the advantages of getting up promptly 
at seven. You may decide that getting up promptly 
at seven is not worth its price. You may decide 
to compromise on half past seven, which would 
allow you half an hour's more sleep and a little 
more time to dress. Upon what you decide it is 
not for me to comment. But your decision should 



38 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

be carried out. No more demoralizing course 
could be conceived than daily to resolve to arise 
at seven and the next day always to wait until a 
quarter to eight. Such a course comes only be- 
cause, when you make your resolves, you do not 
fairly face the price. 

This rule is so important, and has so wide a 
bearing, that we cannot forsake it here. It applies 
to all our resolves. Let me illustrate with the 
example that has become the favorite with all 
writers on will. I refer to drinking. The law- 
makers insist on solving this particular will-prob- 
lem for us, but the Constitutional Amendment, so 
far as I am aware, puts no ban on its invaluable 
use as a literary example. Moreover, I cannot be 
arrested for pointing out that the actual temptations 
to drinking are not altogether a thing of the past. 

You have a drink; then another. Perhaps you 
have one or two more, though the count becomes 
rather confusing after a time. The liquor "touches 
the spot," as you say, and for a time it produces 
a mental and emotional reaction that is highly 
delightful. But the next morning your stomach is 
upset; your food doesn't taste right: you have a 
headache; your mental and physical movements 
are slow and listless; you get little work done; 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 39 

the color of the universe is drab. You are prob- 
ably minus a good deal of money. You feel your 
self-respect slipping. You are losing the respect 
of your friends. And your resolve that morning, 
accompanied with the usual terrible knitting of 
brow and clenching of fist and of teeth (as if that 
helped) is that these occasions of getting drenched 
must forever cease, end, terminate. 

And then what? That acute psychologist, 
William James, can tell you much better than I : 
"How many excuses does the drunkard find when 
each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of 
liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in 
such matters oblige him to test; moreover it is 
poured out and it is sin to waste it; also others 
are drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse. 
Or it is but to enable him to sleep, or just to get 
through this job of work; or it isn't drinking, it 
is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; 
or it is a means of stimulating him to make a more 
powerful resolution in favor of abstinence than 
any he has hitherto made; or it is just this once, 
and one doesn't count, etc., etc., ad libitum — it is, 
in fact, anything you like except being a drunkard. 
That is the conception that will not stay before 
the poor soul's attention. But if he once gets able 



40 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

to pick out that way of conceiving from all the 
other possible ways of conceiving the various 
opportunities which occur, if through thick and 
thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard 
and nothing else, he is not likely to remain one 
long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping 
the right name unwaveringly present to his mind 
proves to be his saving moral act." 

And how is he to get "able to pick out that way 
of conceiving" and hold to it? There is only one 
way. Not in the moment of temptation, but in 
the moment of his resolve, on "the morning after,'' 
that is the time for him to summon all these 
excuses before him, to bring up every possible 
excuse, to think of every conceivable advantage 
of drinking, and then to ask himself whether they 
are powerful enough to offset the conception of 
being a drunkard, or whether the advantages of 
drinking outweigh its disadvantages. He must 
give an honest answer then. If he ignores these 
excuses, on the ground that they are unworthy his 
noble resolve, he will find them dancing before his 
eyes in the next moment of temptation; and not 
having faced and answered them when he was in 
the mood to face and answer them, he is not likely 
to face them in that unhappy moment. 



VI 



SUCCESS AND THE CAPITAL S 

Y COME now to a question, always thought of 
-"- consequence, and growing year by year in the 
prominence assigned to it, until with some men it 
has become the sole pursuit in life. The present 
age is obsessed with its importance in a singular 
degree. The American nation is obsessed with it 
beyond all other nations. Books are printed on it; 
magazines are devoted to it; men learnedly discuss 
its "secret." I refer, as the reader has probably 
divined, to the question of Success. 

You observe that I spell it with the majuscule. 
The meaning of the word thus spelt is at once 
broader and narrower than that of the ordinary 
word. Broader, because it is taken to mean 
success in life. Narrower, because it has come 
to imply a peculiar kind of success. It means first 
of all a material success. It is a synonym for 
"getting on." Where you get to is thought of 
more consequence than what you are. Worship- 



42 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

pers of Success hold in contempt the man who is 
capable of enjoying life in obscurity and on $30 
a week. They measure happiness externally, not 
internally; objectively, not subjectively. Some (a 
growing clan) gauge success directly in proportion 
to the number of dollars on which a man pays 
income tax. Others, less narrow, would accord a 
place to fame, which is apparently conceived not 
so much as having the high estimation of one's 
fellows, as it is having one's name known among 
a large number of them. 

Now implicitly or explicitly, this kind of ex- 
trinsic success is taken by the majority of persons 
as the measure of the intrinsic worth of a man. 
And that is why so many of us pursue it — not 
for itself, not because we personally would give a 
blackberry for it, not because it is indispensable 
to our inmost happiness, but simply that we may 
excite the envy of others and seem happy in their 
eyes. We have a strange habit of estimating our 
own happiness by what other persons think it is; 
and their opinion is likely to be based on our 
material success, since they have little else to go 
by. We continually try to obtain the things that 
the people around us want or profess to want, 
rather than what we want ourselves, because we 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 43 

have never really tried to examine whether there 
is any difference between the two. In trying to 
find whether we are hot or cold, we attach more 
importance to a dubious thermometer than we do 
to our own feelings. 

Now this kind of success, which I have gone so 
far out of my way to become sarcastic about, is 
not commonly attainable without the possession of 
one characteristic, a characteristic of far more im- 
portance in this respect than thrift, intelligence, 
industry or common sense. That characteristic is 
a passionate desire to succeed, a desire so strong 
and overbearing that it amounts to a demand, and 
that, in the strictly economic sense to which I 
have before referred, means a willingness to pay 
the price. 

The price is first of all singleness of purpose 
and concentration of effort. Nearly all of us, at 
school, have thought that we should some day like 
to be President of the United States. But not all 
of us have made it a point to study the lives of 
past presidents to see how they did it. Not all 
of us have taken a law course with that special 
end. Not all of us have refused tempting com- 
mercial opportunities for certain poverty and 
struggle for a time, to gain an end in which the 



44 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

mathematical chances were ridiculously and over- 
whelmingly against us. Not all of us have kept 
desperately fanning the embers of dissatisfaction, 
fanning them into a constant white hot flame. 
With most of us the early fire dies; the embers 
fade and grow cool. We reach as high a level as 
we ever seriously hope to reach. We have spasms 
of dissatisfaction with our position in the world, 
but not sufficient dissatisfaction to make us work 
our way out of the rut to a higher position. We 
have moments of longing for the mountain tops, 
but not enough longing to make us willing to give 
up something for them. Strolling in the valleys 
is so much more pleasant than climbing. 

And singleness of purpose demands more sac- 
rifices than mere industry. It involves giving up 
all pleasures that interfere with it. They may be 
quite innocent pleasures, their sole offense being 
that they occupy time. It involves making one- 
self narrow; one cannot be a success in any one 
line if one dissipates one's energies in a number 
of activities — unless, of course, one be a versatile 
genius whose energies overflow, like Benjamin 
Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, or Goethe — and such 
instances are so rare that they may be ignored. 

Let there be no mistake. I do not mean to 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 45 

discourage efforts to become a Success. I mean 
merely to indicate that the goal has a price. I want 
you merely to ask yourself whether you are willing 
to pay that price; to ask yourself candidly how far 
you want to go and how much you are willing to 
pay; for if you do not ask yourself now, before 
you make your Success resolutions, you are likely 
to ask yourself later on. As you see obstacles 
and disappointments pile up, you are apt to begin 
wondering whether the game is worth the candle, 
whether the colors of the reality are as gorgeous 
as those of the painting. And if you decide to 
give up then, you will have broken your early 
resolution, with all the undermining of self-con- 
fidence and faith in your will which that involves. 



VII 



THE SCALE OF VALUES 



TN spite of the disclaimer at the end of my last 
-"- chapter, I am sure to be accused, because of the 
satiric remarks preceding that disclaimer, of dis- 
paraging Ambition, and I may not only be 
denounced for this, but I shall be told that of all 
places in which to disparage Ambition, a book pur- 
porting to show the way to will-power is the 
strangest and most unforgivable. But I hasten 
again to assure the reader that I have not dis- 
paraged Ambition at all; I have only disparaged 
ambitions. I have merely intimated that many of 
our ambitions are misdirected. We are wor- 
shipping false gods. A man in our day who 
laughs at the idea of taking seriously Zeus and 
Jupiter is not denounced as irreligious; in fact, 
he would probably be called irreligious if he 
did take them seriously. A time will come, I 
prophecy, when a man who bows down before our 
present popular conceptions of "success will be 
denounced as lacking in ambition. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 47 

But there is a liability to misunderstanding more 
important than this. Many will derive the idea 
from some of my past remarks that the only thing 
I regard of importance is what a man actually does 
and does not want, and that I am not concerned 
with what he ought to want. This is a misinter- 
pretation which cannot be allowed to pass. I have 
not and I cannot dwell at length upon what our 
ideals and aspirations ought to be; that is a subject 
for ethics, and I am talking of will-power. But 
for the sake of clarity, perhaps it were well that I 
indicate my position on this point. 

We have seen that every ambition has its price, 
and that, before launching yourself formally upon 
the attainment of any ambition, you must first of 
all ask yourself whether it is worth its price. But 
the value of accomplishing an ambition, or the 
sacrifice involved in securing it, are not objective 
things. They exist in your own mind, and they 
may be changed in your own mind. 

An analogy may make this clearer. Whether 
or not you decide to pay $100 for an overcoat, 
depends both upon the value you attach to the 
overcoat and the value you attach to the $100. 
The worth you set upon the coat will depend upon 
whether you are without an overcoat altogether, 



48 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

or whether the one you have was acquired six 
years ago, or whether you just bought an over- 
coat last week. The value you attach to the over- 
coat will also depend upon whether you are 
enamored with the style of it, or whether you laugh 
at the style of it; and such things depend quite 
as much upon your own tastes as they do upon the 
overcoat. The value you attach to the $100 will 
depend upon whether you are earning $25 a week 
or $2,500 a week. Finally, the value you attach 
to the $100 and to the overcoat will depend upon 
your whole scale of values; your entire gamut of 
tastes and likes and dislikes ; upon how many other 
uses you can think of for the $100, upon whether 
you attach more importance, say, to a $100 set of 
books; upon how much importance you attach to 
dress generally, and how much to money as a 
whole. In short, the value of a tangible object, 
unlike its weight, shape and dimensions, does not 
inhere in the object itself; it inheres in you. The 
weight of a long ton of coal will always be exactly 
the same as the weight of a long ton of bricks; but 
the value of a ton of coal will not always be $15, 
either to you or to the community as a whole. 

Now what applies to economic values applies 
with equal force to social and moral values (and 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 49 

I am here speaking of these values as they are, 
not according to any notions of what they ought 
to be). These, too, exist not objectively, in the 
outward world, but in your own soul. When I 
advise you first to consider the price before setting 
out after any ambition, the decision you take may 
still differ from that of jour neighbor who takes 
similar forethought. Imagine two men, each able 
to forsee perfectly all the consequences of his 
actions, and each trying to decide whether to make 
it his ambition to amass a million dollars. The 
first may enjoy putting forth effort; he may relish 
competition and strife; he may be satisfied with 
a narrow and exclusive devotion to his business; 
and the attainment of a million dollars may seem 
to him an attainment glorious beyond all other 
attainments. It is not difficult to see that such 
a man would go ahead with the struggle for this 
object. But the second man, equally farsighted, 
may be by nature more indolent, or, though pos- 
sessed of equal energy, he may have a wider range 
of interests; he may like pictures, music, litera- 
ture, philosophy, travel or women; the ambition 
for a million dollars may seem to him a ridiculous 
and childish ambition ; he may feel that an income 
of $7,500 a year suffices for all his needs. It is 



50 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

not difficult to see that for him the price attached 
to amassing a million dollars would seem prohibi- 
tive, and the end not worth the gaining. 

But we must pass from this consideration of 
what men do and do not want, to the question of 
what they ought or ought not to want. Of two 
men, that man who has the more ambition, who 
is prepared to make the greater sacrifices, must 
be admitted to have the more will-power; but he 
is not necessarily the more admirable character. 
I am all for ambition and success, but what I 
remonstrate against is the particular kind of ambi- 
tion and success which is usually held up to the 
young man of today to emulate. It is usually 
narrow and material, and nearly always selfish. A 
man ought to set himself a high goal, and he 
ought to attach a high value to that goal. Further, 
he ought not to attach too much importance to 
obstacles and sacrifices; he should welcome these 
as challenges to test his mettle. But the goal must 
be great enough to make the obstacles and sac- 
rifices worth while; and it may be questioned 
whether a purely material and selfish goal does 
that. 

What ought a man's goal to be? Stated in the 
most abstract terms, it ought to be ( beyond the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 51 

mere duty of making himself happy) to increase 
social well-being, to confer the greatest benefits 
he can upon humanity. But instead of this, what 
do nine-tenths of the Success writers exhort us to 
do? They point to the great material successes, 
the men who have gathered in more engraved paper 
than other men, the men who have attained fame; 
and they tell us to ape such as these. It is true 
that a very large number of Successful Men, in the 
process of attaining money and fame, have inci- 
dentally conferred benefits upon mankind. That is 
one of the ways of acquiring money and fame. 
In order to "get ahead," you may work harder 
than the man at the desk beside you; you may 
study at home, you may be more efficient, you may 
devise plans for saving the firm money; you may 
patent an invention. And by these methods, 
adopted primarily that you yourself may get ahead, 
you are adding to your productivity; you are 
increasing the world's supply of goods and serv- 
ices; you are conferring benefits upon mankind. 
Though your end is selfish, you are compelled to 
help others in order to attain it. In order to per- 
suade people to give you a lot of money, you are 
obliged to confer equivalent benefits upon them. 
"But if the pursuit of what you call material 



52 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

and narrow and selfish ends leads to all these bene- 
ficial results/' some one may ask, "what objection 
can you possibly have to them?" My objection, 
my dear sir, is simply this. So long as fame and 
money are the ends sought, the benefits conferred 
upon humanity are mere by-products; whereas, in 
any civilization worthy of the name, the ends 
sought by individuals ought to be social well-being, 
and fame and money the by-products. When 
money is the end sought, and social well-being 
merely the by-product, we produce more money 
than we need and not enough well-being. We 
over-eat and over-dress and turn out mountains of 
silly luxuries; we seek to outdo our neighbors in 
material display; while the enrichment of the mind 
and the elevation of the soul are ignored, or occupy 
us only in moments when we have nothing else to 
do. 

Material wealth is all very well in its way ; 
a certain amount of it is an indispensable prelim- 
inary to any culture of the spirit whatever : un- 
less a man have enough to eat, his brain will not 
for very long be able to function. But after we 
have acquired enough wealth to live in comfort 
(which does not include silly competitive display), 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 53 

we ought to turn to higher and better things. I 
feel like shouting: For God's sake, man, can't you 
see that the acquisition of wealth is a means and 
not an end? 

It is further and finally to be said that the man 
whose sole ambition is to accumulate wealth (and 
even to do so honestly), must give people what 
they want and not necessarily what is good for them. 
A theatrical manager can gather a fortune by stag- 
ing salacious plays. There is a moving picture actor 
with an irresistibly funny way of wiggling his feet. 
He acquires hundreds of thousands of dollars a 
year for making people laugh; while college pro- 
fessors starve for trying to make people think. 

Yet after all this, there is something to be said 
for the ordinary selfish ambition. It is vastly 
better than no ambition at all. Though the benefits 
it confers on others may be incidental, it does confer 
them; and those benefits, even if they are usually 
material, are often vast. The world would be a 
very meagre place if we lost our selfish ambitions 
without acquiring altruistic ambitions in their stead. 
And from the standpoint of will-power, which is, 
after all, our present subject, there is a very great 
deal to be said for selfish ambitions. Huxley, in 



54 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

his lecture on Scientific Education, happens to have 
said this so well that I cannot do better than quote 
his words : 

"I do not wish it to be supposed that, because I 
happen to be devoted to more or less abstract and 
'unpractical' pursuits, I am insensible to the weight 
which ought to be attached to that which has been 
said to be the English conception of Paradise; 
namely, 'getting on.' I look upon it that 'getting 
on' is a very important matter indeed. I do not 
mean merely for the sake of the coarse and tangible 
results of success, but because humanity is so con- 
stituted that a vast number of us would never be 
impelled to those stretches of exertion which make 
us wiser and more capable men, if it were not for 
the absolute necessity of putting on our faculties 
all the strain they will bear, for the purpose of 
'getting on' in the most practical sense." 



VIII 

CONTROLLING ONE'S THOUGHTS 

AFTER this ethical interlude on life's ideals, 
perhaps we had better take our bearings again. 
We have seen that whatever our ideals, whatever 
our resolutions, we should, before adopting those 
resolutions, calmly and coldly count the price of 
carrying them out. That was our first rule of 
will-power. 

Now the second rule follows naturally from the 
first. Once you have made your decision, having 
coldly decided that that is what you want and that 
you are willing to pay the price, your decision is 
forever beyond dispute. You should never ask 
yourself again whether the other course is possible; 
whether it is really worth while staying home to 
study for a specified number of evenings each week ; 
whether a man who has resolved to stop drinking 
can really do so suddenly without blowing to pieces ; 
whether smoking is really as harmful as you had 
thought it was ; whether a man in a moderate posi- 
es 



56 THE WAY TO WILL-FOWER 

tion, without so many responsibilities and burdens 
on his shoulders, doesn't really get just as much 
enjoyment out of life as the Success. Those ques- 
tions are forever closed: you have asked them 
before and have decided them. You will know that 
thoughts determine action, and to control your 
actions you will begin by controlling your thought. 
You will vivify all the advantages that will come 
from carrying out your resolution. You will paint 
them in glowing colors. You will dwell on them 
constantly. The disadvantages you will ignore. 
They are disadvantages only to fools : a wise man 
does not think them so. 

Here I need to give a warning. Concentrate on 
the positive side ; avoid the negative. That is, dwell 
on the benefits of carrying your resolve out, not on 
the evils of failing. If you would fight a craving 
for morphine, do not let your imagination revel in 
the picture of the ashen-faced, palsied, loathsome 
and pitiable creature you would be as a morphine 
fiend. Picture the upstanding, energetic, healthy- 
complexioned, respect-compelling man you are going 
to be if you refuse it. 

A morbid, terrible picture is a mind-filling 
picture; it exerts a strange fascination. If a 
thought once sufficiently fills the mind, be it never 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 57 

so terrible, unreasonable or self-destructive, it will 
be acted upon. I need merely cite the familiar 
experience of dizziness when looking over a preci- 
pice or a high building, or even a low building if 
there be no rail around. The height from sea-level 
has nothing to do with it; and the height of the 
potential fall is less important than the actual danger 
of falling. You grow dizzy because you think of 
what would happen to you if you lost your balance 
and fell, or even if you were to throw yourself off. 
The higher the roof or precipice the more fascinat- 
ing does this idea become; hence the greater the 
dizziness. It is the very terror of the thought, the 
reality of the fear that you are going to act upon 
it, that makes you dizzy. If you could get com- 
pletely rid of the idea, you would completely lose 
the dizziness. I knew a man living in Buffalo who 
did not dare to visit Niagara Falls, lest he should 
throw himself into the magnificent rapids just above 
them. There are doubtless many like him. 

Fill the mind with the positive idea of your 
resolve, and you will carry it out. 

Some readers will have recognized an affinity 
between this rule and the doctrine known as "sug- 
gestion." Little is yet known of suggestion, but 
enough is known for scientific men to become 



58 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

assured that it is no mere superstition; practising 
physicians recognize its great value. One writer, 
T. Sharper Knowlson, convinced of the theory, has 
made some pointed remarks on the subject: "We 
have not to aim at a strong will, and wait until it 
'comes.' Act as if it had already come . . . The 
man who feels he cannot pass a public house with- 
out an irresistible temptation to enter and drink to 
excess, must tell himself he can, and proceed to walk 
past the place of temptation." He suggests a method 
for combatting insomnia. One should say to one- 
self, "I sleep, I sleep," repeating these words until 
a state of drowsiness is induced. "It is wrong to 
say, 'I shall sleep,' because that implies desire, and 
hence a possibility of non-fulfillment. Suggestion 
works by affirmation, not by promise." 

My next piece of advice is this : Never defy 
temptation — evade it. 

You may look upon this advice as inconsistent 
with the above quotation. You may dismiss it as 
unworthy. I maintain that it is prudent. For urg- 
ing it I have the strongest psychologic grounds. 

In one of his studies in pessimism, Schopenhauer 
makes a remark to the effect that man has thousands 
of desires, and as at any moment not more than a 
few of them are fulfilled, man's existence must 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 59 

necessarily always be miserable. Schopenhauer 
could only arrive at a conclusion so opposed to 
common sense because his psychology was defective. 
Desires are not ever-present. Desires are like 
thoughts — they are thoughts — that come and go. 
They are aroused by association and suggestion, 
and less apt to appear when there is no association 
or suggestion to call them up. 

I walk along the street. I am, so far as I am 
consciously aware, content ; which is the same thing 
as being so. But I pass a fruit-stand; I espy some 
delicious peaches, and there is immediately aroused 
the desire for peaches. The absence of the fruit 
then produces in me a maw, which must be filled. 
When I watch an exhibition tennis match, my desire 
to become a marvellous player is intense. When I 
go to a skating rink, I attach great value to the 
personal achievement of expert skating. When I 
read a book on the history of metaphysics, I desire 
to become a great philosopher. When I listen to 
speeches in the midst of a presidential campaign, I 
fancy that the one thing worth while is to become 
an eminent statesman. Between campaigns, this 
ambition falls into the background. If I have not 
been skating for a long time, my desire for preem- 
inence in it fades. 



60 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

The moral of all this, on its positive side, is to 
cultivate most your desires for those activities which 
will best forward your final purposes — those pur- 
poses which you have calmly, deliberately and fully 
reasoned out. On the negative side, the moral is to 
avoid all associations, suggestions, lines of thought, 
which arouse desires that interfere with your final 
purposes, that is to say, desires that you have 
resolved against. 

The drunkard often has little difficulty in keep- 
ing straight until he sees liquor; even then he is 
better able to resist than after he has scented or 
tasted liquor. If you have resolved forever to cease 
drinking, do not, to show the strength of your de- 
termination, as people do in motion picture dramas, 
put the red glass to your lips and then set it down. 
Putting the glass to your lips is liable to be your 
undoing. Do not raise the glass. Do not order 
the drink. Do not enter the saloon. If the saloon 
is directly in line on your way home, and habit has 
dictated your entrance, walk a block out of the 
way if necessary. 

Mr. Knowlson says that you should tell your- 
self you can walk past, and then do it. That is 
all very well for the later stages, but I fancy you 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 61 

will find that suggestion and self-faith have their 
greatest value when not over-strained. You can- 
not lift a 500-pound weight at arm's length by tell- 
ing yourself you can. But by gradual exercises, 
adding a little bit each week, a man may develop a 
physique which may enable him to accomplish 
marvels he never dreamed of before. And the will 
is just like that. It must be developed slowly. 

This is not my discovery. Bacon discovered it 
some three centuries ago, and though his language 
is somewhat antiquated, his wisdom is as wise to- 
day as on the day it was written : "He that seeketh 
victory over his nature, let him not set himself too 
great nor too small tasks; for the first will make 
him dejected by often failings, and the second will 
make him a small proceeder, though by often pre- 
vailings. And, at the first, let him practise with 
helps, as swimmers do with bladders, or rushes; 
but after a time let him practise with disadvantages, 
as dancers do with thick shoes; for it breeds great 
perfection if the practice be harder than the use." 

Therefore it is better to walk around the block 
a while, if you must, before going past. Then you 
may have faith ; and your faith will be strengthened 
by the modest record of avoidance behind you. 



62 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

This alcoholic illustration, as I have indicated 
before, may be legally obsolete; but it is sufficient 
to indicate to a reader fertile in ideas the applica- 
tion of the principle to any other instance. 



IX 



THE OMNIPRESENCE OF HABIT 

npHUS far I have spoken as if desires (and fears 
■*- and aversions) were the sole determinants of 
action. We come now to something quite as impor- 
tant, if, indeed, it is not more important than these. 
While it is often determined by them, it sometimes 
determines them, and it often guides action with no 
relation to desires whatever. From the title of this 
chapter, the astute reader will have already surmised 
what I am talking about. 

We may best approach the phenomenon of habit 
by going outside of the individual and his brain. 
Habit applies to the inanimate no less than to the 
animate world. Fold a napkin in a particular way 
and it is more easy to fold that way the next time. 
The creases in a sheet of wrapping paper become 
indelible. An automobile engine runs more 
smoothly after it has been "worked in," and the 
friction edges worn down. The very clothes on 
your back form habits: they fit you better after 



64 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

you have worn them for some time than when they 
are new ; they drape more snugly to the form. The 
notorious difference in comfort between old and 
new shoes is possible because the old shoes have 
been worked into certain feet-conforming habits. 
A path across a field, be it never so winding, be- 
comes beaten more and more, becomes more dis- 
tinct and unalterable. That is because it becomes 
more and more the path of least resistance. And 
the tendency of all bodies and forces, animate and 
inanimate, to follow the path of least resistance, 
is the secret of the formation of habit. 

You assert that the field path is formed by 
human beings, creatures of habit, the beaten path, 
and of ruts. I answer by the illustration of a 
river bed, which the water follows, though the bed 
twist and turn and wind. Originally it was formed 
by sheer accident, as the water, beginning as a 
spring on a hill or mountain top, bubbled up, made 
its way around this rock and over that, split here, 
joined there, washing away the gravel as it went, 
digging ^s bed deeper and deeper, more firm and 
more unchangeable, till at last it flowed in a full, 
deep, untroubled current. You have doubtless seen 
the bed of a spring or brook dried up at certain 
seasons of the year. The definition of a brook is 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 65 

a body of water; yet you know, though there is no 
water here, that this is indeed the brook, for this 
is the path the water will take when it flows again. 
The dried-up brook-bed represents what a habit is 
like in the brain when you are not acting upon it. 

A more familiar comparison to those who live in 
the world created by man and not by nature is the 
groove in a phonograph record — silent in itself, 
but always ready to produce a tune, and always the 
same tune, when it is put on; that is to say, when 
the circumstances call it forth. 

The omnipresence of habit is almost terrifying 
when one reflects upon it. From the minute a 
man shuts off his alarm clock on one morning, till 
the minute he shuts it off on the next morning, it 
controls him. It dictates and makes possible nine- 
tenths of his actions. Amd nine-tenths of the habits 
of most men are formed unconsciously. It is 
astounding that men should so leave this thing to 
chance, when it determines the very texture of their 
lives ; yet the fact must be recorded. 

A man gets up at eight because it is his habit to 
get up at eight, though he has set his alarm and 
his intentions to arise at half-past seven. If it is 
his habit in a vacant way to contemplate getting up 
for fifteen minutes before he actually does get up, 



66 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

that he will do every morning. .When he actually 
gets up, habit dictates which sock shall go on first, 
whether shirt or trousers shall go on first, whether 
collar or shoes shall take precedence, which shoe 
shall be put on before the other, whether he begins 
buttoning his vest from the bottom or from the 
top. 

At this very private stage of his toilet we shall 
leave him a moment for a digression. This digres- 
sion is needed to point out that habit is not always 
evil. The same confusion of thought exists in re- 
gard to habit, and about being a "slave to habit," 
that clusters around the word "desire." Most of 
the average man's habits are not only good but in- 
dispensable. Habit may be formally defined as an 
aptitude or inclination for some action, acquired by 
frequent repetition, and showing itself in increased 
facility of performance or in decreased power of 
resistance. Less correctly but more practically, I 
should define habit as the doing of a thing without 
conscious attention and often without thought of 
the purpose of doing it. Most men cannot tell you 
how they dress, which shoe they put on first, or 
whether they button their vests from the top or 
bottom, until they first mentally rehearse the action 
or even until they actually do it. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 67 

As to the great blessings of habit, Dr. Maudsley 
says: "If an act became no easier after being done 
several times, if the careful direction of conscious- 
ness were necessary to its accomplishment on each 
occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a 
lifetime might be confined to one or two deeds — 
that no progress could take place in development. 
A man might be occupied all day in dressing and 
undressing himself; the attitude of his body would 
absorb all his attention and energy; the washing 
of his hands or the fastening of a button would be 
as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child 
on its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be 
completely exhausted by his exertions. Think of 
the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the 
many efforts which it must make, and of the ease 
with which it at last stands, unconscious of any 
effort." 

Returning now to our typical man and his morn- 
ing toilet, we follow him downstairs to his break- 
fast. Habit dictates what he eats, whether his 
breakfast is light or heavy, whether he takes a 
cereal or not, whether his fried egg$ are turned or 
not. Habit has already dictated what time he 
usually arrives at breakfast; it must, therefore, 
inevitably dictate whether he shall bolt his breakfast 



68 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

or take it leisurely. Habit dictates whether he 
props his paper in front of him at breakfast or 
whether he waits until he boards his train. Habit 
dictates his table manners. Habit dictates his tone 
of voice to his wife. If he boards a train, habit 
dictates whether he shall get on the rear car or the 
second car from the front. Arrived at his office, 
habit dictates the manner in which he approaches 
his work, the way he handles interviews, his pro- 
fessional mannerisms, his tricks of gesture, his 
choice of words, his very manner of thinking and 
way of looking at things. Habit dictates the time 
he goes out to lunch, and the place to which he 
goes. Many a man with a special luncheon en- 
gagement at an unhabitual place has suddenly 
checked himself to remember it, after finding that 
his feet had mysteriously carried him right up to 
the very door of his customary restaurant! 

Finally, when he has returned home and taken his 
dinner, habit dictates how he shall spend the evening. 
If he is in the habit of going out every night, he 
will feel restless and uncomfortable staying in. He 
will go out not for enjoyment, but because he knows 
not what else to do. He knows merely that the 
thought of staying home is intolerable. His so- 
called pleasures, far from spontaneous, fall into 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 69 

certain conventionalized and accepted activities, 
which may be called social habits, habits possessed 
by the community at large. They will differ be- 
tween one country and another, between one town 
in the same country and another. Our man will 
find himself for a period going frequently out to 
play poker; then for another period he will find his 
most frequent diversion will be going to dances; 
for a while it will be going to the theatre or the 
"movies"; for another period it may be bowling; 
then it will be staying at home to read. Such 
habits change with seasons, by sheer accident, and 
in different periods of life. The evenings of some 
men are as much a burden to them as their business 
day. Their evening's outing is as much a duty as 
earning their bread and cheese. As they dress to 
go out, they sigh. They are about to embark on 
one of the accredited methods of "having a good 
time"; it often does not occur to them to ask 
whether they are actually having it. They vaguely 
regard going out as a sort of necessity, like Fate. 
They are indeed slaves of habit. 

But our man's day is not ended. He returns 
home. Habit dictates the hour at which he re- 
tires, even though he has made a thousand resolu- 
tions, night after night, that he shall hereafter re- 



70 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

tire an hour earlier. In fact, the nightly resolu- 
tion itself may be a habit. The resolution is usu- 
ally made in the morning; for an outside influence 
(his employer or the relentless call of business) has 
pretty definitely fixed the hour at which he must 
arise. His manner of undressing is as definitely 
fixed as his manner of dressing. He puts out the 
light, opens the window and goes to bed. Habit 
dictates the position he assumes in bed, and perhaps 
how deeply he sleeps or fails to sleep 

We have pursued our typical man enough, and 
we leave him. There are worse than he. Absent- 
minded persons, not accustomed to changing their 
dress to go out of an evening, and intending only to 
take off a few articles, have found themselves get- 
ting completely undressed, and proceeding to go to 
bed. 

You who laugh irreverently at this, who boast 
that you are free from unthinking habit, and that 
you act only with thought, kindly make this experi- 
ment. Perhaps you carry your watch in your lower 
right-hand vest pocket, the chain across your vest, 
your keys or knife or ornament in the other pocket 
on the end of the chain. Reverse it; put your 
watch in your lower left-hand pocket. Now, with- 
out making any special effort either to forget or to 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 71 

remember that you have shifted your watch, wait 
until an unplanned occasion to use it arises, and see 
how many times you reach in your right-hand 
pocket for it and pull out the other end of the chain 
before finally a new habit is formed. Or put your 
watch in your upper pocket, and see how many times 
you reach for your lower pocket and think frantic- 
ally for a moment that your watch is gone. Or 
shift your silver change from your trousers to 
your coat pocket, or from your right to your left, 
and see how many times the wrong hand dives into 
the wrong place ! 

Habit makes possible the acquisition of all skilled 
movement. The practice that makes perfect, the 
practice at swimming, tennis, skating, dancing, 
bowling, juggling, automobile driving and stunting 
with an airplane, is nothing more and nothing less 
than the formation of habit. I have learned to 
operate a typewriter by touch. As I write these 
words, I do not have to pick out the letters on the 
keyboard. I do not look at the keyboard. I do 
not even think of the letters. I think only of what 
I am going to say; I watch the words on the paper 
as they marvellously form; and my fingers, with- 
out attention from me, are mysteriously finding 
their way with lightning rapidity to the proper 



72 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

keys. Habit! And if I should start to think con- 
sciously of my fingers or the keys, I should begin 
to make mistakes and my speed would slow up. 

If you are still not sufficiently impressed with 
the importance of habit, let me quote to you the 
words, not of a moralist given to sermonizing, but 
the dry scientific statement of fact by a psycholo- 
gist, W. B. Pillsbury: 

"The useful man is for the greater part marked 
off from the useless and the vicious by the nature 
of his habits. Industry or indolence, good temper 
or bad temper, even virtue or vice, are in the last 
analysis largely matters of habit. One forms the 
habit of working at certain times of the day, and 
soon if one is not busy at that time one experiences 
a lively sense of discomfort. Or, on the contrary, 
one forms the habit of loafing all day. Work then 
becomes distasteful and indolent irresponsibility is 
established. Losing one's temper is largely a habit, 
as is self-control. Each time one is provoked by 
a trifle, it becomes the more difficult to look calmly 
at an unpleasant episode; while each time one re- 
mains calm under difficult circumstances, strength 
is gained for later difficulties. Similarly, whenever 
temptation is resisted, virtue gains a victory; when 
temptation is yielded to, new weaknesses develop. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 73 

Frequent yielding makes resistance practically im- 
possible. A bank president of established morals 
could no more step out and pick a pocket that was 
temptingly unprotected than he could fly. The 
habitual drunkard can no more resist the invitation 
to have a glass than he can resist the action of gravi- 
tation while falling freely through space. Frequent 
giving in has entirely destroyed his original free- 
dom of choice." 



THE ALTERATION OF HABIT 

HABIT being of such enormous importance, it 
is our urgent duty to seek the means of form- 
ing good habits and of breaking bad ones. 

How does habit become possible? For the 
answer to that, one must turn to that strange and 
awe-compelling mass of gray and white matter 
boxed within the bones of the skull. The brain is 
composed of an immense number of separate and 
minute cells, called "neurones." Each is connected 
potentially with a number of other neurones. The 
points of connection are called "synapses." We 
may visualize the brain as a network of delicate 
piping or exquisitely slender tubes, each tube con- 
taining a number of valves leading to other tubes. 
The tubes are the neurones ; the valves the synapses. 
When a stimulus comes from the outside world, it 
sends a mysterious current, which we may envisage 
as the current of some fluid, like water, through one 
of the tubes; this forces itself out of one of the 

71. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 75 

valves into the particular tube leading from that 
valve; this tube in turn has a number of valves, 
and the current forces its way out of the one most 
easily opened, and so on, until the current emerges 
finally in the form of an action. In this picture 
I have represented as tubes nerves as well as neu- 
rones. The tubes which send incoming messages 
to the brain are called "sensory" nerves; those which 
carry out the orders of the brain are called "motor" 
nerves. 

If the outward stimulus is an itch, the message 
is carried by an adjacent sensory nerve to the brain, 
passes through the tubes and valves there, the neu- 
rones and synapses, and emerges through a motor 
nerve in the form of the action of scratching. Or, 
the itch is discovered by some nerve in the eye to 
be due to a scab, which it would be harmful to 
scratch. This nerve sets up a counter current; 
other valves are opened and others kept closed, and 
the action of scratching does not follow. Certain 
valves, or synapses, are from birth predisposed to 
open with particular ease. The special paths which 
these make possible are called instincts. The in- 
fant feeds on its mother's breasts at birth. It has 
had no experience, no knowledge; it may not be 
able to see. Yet a particular sensation awakens a 



76 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

particular response. The instincts we have in com- 
mon. In addition to these inherited paths which 
all have, there are paths open in the brain at birth 
which vary in different individuals. These we call 
innate characteristics. 

Now while these paths of instinct and innate 
characteristics are often highly useful, they are 
sometimes exceedingly dangerous. They need to 
be supplemented by experience and knowledge, 
which dictate the opening of new or altered paths. 
When a path is once taken, it wears down the valves, 
the synapses, through which it passes. Those 
valves open so much the easier thereafter, and the 
taking of that path becomes so much easier the next 
time. On the next passage of the current those 
particular synapses open more easily still, until the 
time may come when they will form the only pos- 
sible path, when it will be impossible for the well- 
worn valve to offer more resistance to the on-rush- 
ing current than the valve seldom or never opened. 

Such is the physiologist's explanation of habit, 
and it is at once a despair and a glorious promise. 
Forming a new habit is like forging for yourself 
a new path in the woods, through stubborn under- 
brush and prickly thorns, while all the while it is 
possible for you to take the well-worn, hard-trodden, 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 77 

pleasant path that already exists. But you can re- 
flect that every time you travel through the new 
path you are going to tramp down more shrubbery 
and clear more entanglements from the way. Every 
time you take the path it is going to become easier. 

And that is the cheerful side. When you first 
set about to abolish a bad habit and establish a good 
one, it is going to take all the effort, all the "will- 
power," at your command. But habit begins soon 
to take the place of will-power; it will require less 
and less effort, less and less will-power, each time; 
the strain diminishes, until in time it disappears. 
For the practice of that particular virtue, will-power 
has become almost useless. Will-power is not 
needed all the time. It is called for only at the 
period of change. 

But the period of change is all-important. It is 
better not to be too ambitious, and not to try to 
change too many habits at once. Yet as soon as 
you find one new method of response becoming 
automatic, you may turn to another. You will 
always find another. No matter how long you 
live nor how diligent you are, you will never ex- 
haust the supply of new good habits that it is pos- 
sible to form, nor the supply of old bad habits it 
is possible to break. And all the time you will be 



78 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

keeping alive the faculty of effort within you. Put- 
ting forth moral effort, or failing to, is itself a 
habit. 

All this comes under the head of what William 
James would call making our nervous system our 
ally instead of our enemy, which consists in making 
automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many 
useful actions as we can. James, building on the 
suggestions of Bain, has laid down several maxims 
of habit which it would be difficult to improve upon : 

"The first is that in the acquisition of a new 
habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must 
take care to launch ourselves -with as strong and de- 
cided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the 
possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the 
right motives; put yourself assiduously in condi- 
tions that encourage the new way; make engage- 
ments incompatible with the old; take a public 
pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your 
resolution with every aid you know. This will give 
your new beginning such a momentum that the 
temptation to break down will not occur as it other- 
wise might; and every day during which a break- 
down is postponed adds to the chances of its not 
occurring at all." 

In this connection let me say a word about the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 79 

effect of a change of environment upon a change of 
habit. In our ordinary life a certain routine is laid 
down for us from without, and this largely controls 
the routine developed from within. Our hours of 
business and the hours at which we take our meals, 
the time it takes to get from the office to the home 
and the method that must be taken, the very arrange- 
ment of furniture in our room, all help to engender 
and develop and petrify certain habits. But if a 
break should occur in this routine, if the hours or 
the nature of our business should be changed, if 
we should move from the city to the country, a vast 
number of our habits would be changed perforce. 
Such changes in environment should be welcomed 
when they occur; they should be recognized and 
seized upon as rare opportunities for the conscious 
formation of new useful habits and the breaking 
of old bad ones. The old habits were made possible 
because they were unconsciously suggested by asso- 
ciations in the old environment. But when we 
change, we can no longer do some of the old things 
absent-mindedly, because the old responses are not 
suggested, and often they do not fit. Reform in 
our habits of rising and retiring, in the hasty or 
leisurely eating of our meals, and many another 
daily custom that determines our life happiness, 



80 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

thus becomes more possible. But the trouble is 
that most of us, when such opportunities come, fail 
to appreciate them, and fall again unconsciously, 
without deliberate choice, into habits as bad as the 
habits we left. 

Returning to the James-Bain maxims, the second 
is : "Never suffer an exception to occur till the new 
habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is 
like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is 
carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than 
a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of 
training is the great means of making the nervous 
system act infallibly right." 

A German writer has remarked : "He who every 
day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving 
at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops 
and returns for a fresh run." 

This leads to James' third maxim, which is: 
"Seise the very first possible opportunity to act on 
every resolution you make, and on every emotional 
prompting you may experience in the direction of 
the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the 
moment of their forming, but in the moment of 
their producing motor effects, that resolves and 
aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. 
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 81 

possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments 
may be, if one has not taken advantage of every con- 
crete opportunity to act, one's character may remain 
entirely unaffected for the better." 

And to impress his remarks, James gives a final 
example : "The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jeffer- 
son's play, excuses himself for every fresh derelic- 
tion by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! 
he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not 
count it ; but it is being counted none the less. Down 
among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are 
counting it, registering and storing it up to be used 
against him when the next temptation comes. 
Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, 
wiped out." 

Oh, the pathos of telling yourself, when each new 
temptation arises : "I will begin to reform the next 
time. I will yield this time, and this will be the last." 
Oh, the tragedy of that excuse ! Self-deception could 
not possibly be more complete. If you can only 
tell yourself, when temptation arises, not that this 
time will be the last^ but that the last time was the 
last! If you can only repeat that to yourself, if you 
can only force your attention to rivet on that fact, if 
you can only realize that the whole force of your will 
and moral effort must be summoned now and not 



82 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

at some vague time in the future, if you can burn 
into your mind that this battle, this inward struggle 
against temptation, is the only real and crucial one, 
if you can forget about the moral struggles won or 
lost in the past or that you expect to win in the 
future, and concentrate only upon the present battle, 
then truly you will be on the way to will-power. 
And it is the only way. Moral sentiments, fine 
ideals, excellent mottoes, splendid resolutions, are 
all mere preparation for the struggle. They are all 
very well in their place, but if they do not express 
themselves in action, and express themselves at the 
moment when temptation has come, they are worse 
than useless. 

There was once a man whose wife, for curious 
reasons, was beaten by another man. This beating oc- 
curred regularly. The other man would break into 
the house, flog the wife unmercifully in front of the 
husband until she fell unconscious, and then leave. 
The other man was bigger than the husband, so 
the husband could not fight back. But the husband 
bought himself a revolver. It was a beautiful re- 
volver, with an exquisite pearl handle, and its nickel 
finish glistened in the sun. The husband loaded it. 
The other man came again, beat the man's wife 
until she screamed for mercy, and left her prostrate. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 83 

"But where was the husband?" you ask. He was 
right on the scene. "Didn't he use his revolver?" 
you persist. Well, the fact must be admitted that 
a very strange thing happened. When the other 
man came, the husband was so frightened that he 
dropped his revolver and ran. This happened 
again and again. It may be said to the husband's 
credit, however, that every time the beating was 
over, and the other man had left, the husband 
always came back, picked up his revolver, petted 
it lovingly, polished it again, pointed it with magni- 
ficent determination at an imaginary object, and said, 
"Ah, wait till he comes next time." 

This is a parable. It is hardly necessary to point 
out that the other man symbolizes the man's temp- 
tations and cravings and baser instincts, that the 
wife symbolizes his better self, that the revolver 
symbolizes his ideals, and the cartridges his senti- 
ments and mottoes and resolutions. In the moment 
when they were needed, these cartridges did not 
"go off," they did not explode, they were not ef- 
fective, and the simple reason was that the man did 
not summon the effort to pull the trigger. You 
need ask yourself only one question about this 
parable, but your answer must be honest: "Does 
the husband symbolize Me?" 



XI 



WILL AND THE PSYCHOANALYSTS 

iRACTICALLY within the last few years there 
has grown up a body of doctrine, gradually be- 
coming surrounded with a formidable literature, 
which its proponents call a "science" ; and I shall not 
start an argument at the very beginning by denying 
its title to that word. This body of doctrine is called 
"psychoanalysis." It is not quite clear whether its 
adherents consider it a branch of psychology or a 
competitor. But at all events, it has just now be- 
come ubiquitous. It is in the air. It is the fad. 
It has come out of the laboratories into the draw- 
ing rooms, out of the consulting rooms into the 
newspapers. It is discussed by doctors and book- 
reviewers and spinsters and school girls. It deals 
with human action, with the mind, the will, the de- 
sires; it lays down recommendations; and any mod- 
ern book upon the will, though it may embrace or 
damn psychoanalysis, cannot afford to ignore it. 
Now it is very difficult to pass fair judgment 

84 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 85 

upon this body of doctrine. It is so young. It 
has already, to my mind, made not unimportant 
steps in the treatment and cure of insanity and 
nervous diseases, and bids fair to make greater. 
Its theories of multiple personalities and the mean- 
ing of dreams seem to me fruitful working hypoth- 
eses, destined to add to the achievements of psychia- 
try. Its explanations of puritanism and of certain 
phases of war psychology, utterly apart from the 
question of whether or not they have scientific 
value, are delicious and effective bits of satire; and, 
as with Thor stein Veblen's work in economics, the 
satire is heightened, not diminished, by the dry, 
scientific vocabulary in which it is wrapped and 
the impartial scientific attitude which it affects. 

Psychoanalysis, doubtless, is proceeding on many 
wrong theories; but it is constantly testing those 
theories, and as time goes on the bad will be cast 
upon the scrap-heap and new and better theories 
substituted. It is tapping and specializing upon a 
vein which the academic psychology had neglected. 
It has attracted wide popular interest. It has 
brought controversy into psychology; and contro- 
versy, with experiments to prove or disprove, 
always means life and growth and progress, and 
is the enemy of stagnation. It is true that the 



86 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

literature of psychoanalysis is morbid, gruesome, 
depressing; filled with sexual perversions, with in- 
cest, sadism, masochism, onanism, sodomy; but 
what would 3-ou? Medical books on physical dis- 
eases are also horrible — but necessary. Spiritual 
scabs and ravages and pus are more revolting than 
physical — but like the physical, if we are to combat 
them, we must study them with the cold detached 
impartiality of the physician. We must for the 
moment put aside our moral platitudes and denun- 
ciations and contempt and study the disease and 
its cure. The physician does not denounce his 
patient for becoming ill, though the patient may 
well deserve it. He seeks first to restore health. 
Admonition can only follow. 

But when I have said all this in favor of psycho- 
analysis, I have said almost as much as I conscien- 
tiously can. Few of its practitioners are well- 
grounded in psychology, and fewer in biology and 
medicine. It utilizes orthodox medicine, biology, 
psychology, anatomy and physiology when they can 
be used to prove a special point, and rejects them 
when they can not. There is hardly a single analyst 
who could be called a cautious thinker. Most of 
them do not appear to know the difference between 
a substantiated theory and a guess. Presumptive 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 87 

evidence is set down as if it were conclusive evi- 
dence. Some of their deductions are highly fanci- 
ful. They would be extremely difficult to verify, 
and there is usually no attempt at verification. 
Whenever human nature is praised, proof is re- 
quired; but apparently whenever it is satirized or 
insulted, proof is deemed superfluous. The most 
dubious conjecture, based on the frailest kind of 
evidence, is set down with the positive air of a fact. 
Explanations for which the best that can be said is 
that they are possible or plausible are treated as if 
they were the final and only ones; though alterna- 
tive explanations, at least equally and possibly more 
plausible, and certainly nowhere near as far-fetched, 
may occur to a person not altogether hypnotized by 
the Freudian interpretation. 

It is one of the foremost Freudian theories — if, 
indeed, it is not the foremost — that every dream 
(not some dreams, mind you, but every one!) rep- 
resents the gratification of some desire suppressed 
or repressed during the waking state. This de- 
sire, according to Freud, is practically always a 
sexual one; at least the predominance of the sexual 
element appears to be overwhelming. 

Now such a theory in its bald state would not 
impose upon a half-witted person. So the psycho- 



88 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

analysts go on to show that most of our dreams are 
"symbolic." And what ingenious symbolism! 
The unconscious mind asleep seems to me infinitely 
more clever than the conscious mind awake ! It is 
also a theory of Freud's that every act, every slip 
of the tongue, every bit of absent-mindedness or 
forgetfulness, means something. Forgetting a 
name, an event or a figure, is not merely failure 
to remember; it is a positive act. We forget be- 
cause we have an unconscious desire to forget; the 
fact or name is associated with something unpleas- 
ant, and the mind tends to eject it or the uncon- 
scious to suppress it. I wish I had time, for your, 
edification, to quote a few typical examples of the 
"interpretations" which the psychoanalysts give of 
different dreams and trivial acts in the light of 
these theories. Their capacity for reading any- 
thing they choose into anything they want is utterly 
enormous. You would sometimes think from a 
few of these "interpretations" that the psychoana- 
lysts were satirizing or burlesquing themselves. 
Really it is not so. But the reader who has suffi- 
cient psychologic curiosity to be interested in seeing 
how a theory can be ridden to death and then pulled 
to its feet and ridden again would find unsurpassed 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 89 

material by delving a little into psychoanalytic 
literature. 

A large part of the interest in psychoanalysis is 
almost wholly prurient. It is to the fact that it 
deals so largely with "sex," I verily believe, that 
it owes the larger part of its popular vogue. It 
seems, too, to have a certain tendency to wallow 
in it and find a morbid fascination in it. Examples 
of sexual abnormalities are piled up with a relish 
not unlike that which gossiping people have in re- 
tailing scandal, and often apparently with the same 
object — to tell the tale for the sake of the tale. The 
examples are usually more than are needed to en- 
force a given conclusion, though the exact bearing 
of each upon the conclusion is not always indicated. 

There can be little doubt that the reading of psy- 
choanalytic literature tends to suggest and arouse 
sexual trains of thought in the minds of many 
readers, and I am here speaking of "normal" 
readers, and not of what the psychoanalysts would 
call a "sexually hypersensitive" or "hyperassthetic" 
reader. The same, of course, may be true of a 
medical book. I am not condemning. I am merely 
stating a fact. 

This statement has been made before, and one 



90 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

psychoanalyst has attempted to answer it in this 
wise: "The sexual material is present in every 
subject, normal or abnormal, and comes to the sur- 
face very easily. No suggestion is necessary to 
bring it forth." 

That is emphatically not an answer. We have 
seen before, in our inquiry into the nature of de- 
sire, that desires are not ever-present, but become 
active only when some train of thought or some ex- 
ternal observation or stimulus has aroused them; 
and we illustrated by a phonograph record, which, 
while it preserves a tune, is silent when it isn't 
being played. The example of passing the fruit- 
stand was given as a case in point. The like is 
true of sexual desires. Whether a desire "comes 
to the surface" or stays below is a point of very 
great importance. 

The psychoanalytic method is incomplete, insuf- 
ficiently checked up by other methods, and rests upon 
some dubious assumptions. It seeks to interpret 
the normal mind through a study of the abnormal 
mind. This is a perfectly valid and useful method 
within proper limits, but it can be overdone and 
rashly handled. "The neurotic," says one psycho- 
analyst, "only accentuates certain general human 
traits and tendencies and he makes them, thereby, 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 91 

easier to observe." Such a statement needs qualifi- 
cation. Instead of "accentuating" a trait of a nor- 
mal man, the neurotic may be a neurotic because 
he so greatly distorts it. Disease symptoms do 
not "accentuate" health symptoms. 

Finally, to all these sins, psychoanalysis adds the 
unforgivable crime of pedantry. I do not know of 
a science that habitually wraps its thoughts in such 
awesome and jawcracking phraseology, with such 
a maze of newly coined words, above all, habitually 
tacking on the magic word "complex" after de- 
scribing any trait whatever in order to make it 
sound as if something very profound had been 
pointed out. When most of these psychoanalytic 
thoughts are disentangled from the verbiage in 
which they are snarled and concealed, and lie be- 
fore you in all their nakedness, they are seen to be 
either very commonplace and obvious, or very ab- 
surd. Such a discovery might be suspected in ad- 
vance, for poverty of thought habitually tries to 
conceal itself beneath a deluge of diction. This 
may be a case of the "unconscious" or the "inferi- 
ority complex," forming a "self -protective neuro- 
sis!" 

But this is digressing. My purpose is not to 
criticize psychoanalysis as a whole, but to examine 



92 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

one of its cardinal doctrines which seems to me to 
bear directly on the subject of will-power. But first 
I shall have to explain what that doctrine is. 

The psychoanalysts lay a good deal of stress 
upon what is commonly called the subconscious, 
and what they call the unconscious. Their con- 
ception of the unconscious is vividly described by 
Mr. Andre Tridon, in a book on "Psychoanalysis 
and Behavior," from which I shall take the liberty 
of quoting: 

"Our unconscious 'contains' two sorts of 
'thoughts' : those which rise easily to the surface 
of our consciousness and those which remain at the 
bottom and can only be made to rise with more or 
less difficulty. 

"Our unconscious mind is like a pool into which 
dead leaves, dust, rain drops and a thousand other 
things are falling day after day, some of them float- 
ing on the surface for a while, some sinking to the 
bottom and, all of them, after a while, merging 
themselves with the water or the ooze. Let us 
suppose that two dead dogs, one of them weighted 
down with a stone, have been thrown into that pool. 
They will poison its water, and people wishing to 
use those waters will have to rake the ooze and re- 
move the rotting carrion. The dog whose body was 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 93 

not fastened to any heavy object will easily be 
brought to the surface and removed. The other 
will be more difficult to recover, and if the stone 
is very heavy, may remain in the pool until ways 
and means are devised to dismember him or to cut 
the rope holding him down." 

Now these two dogs may be made to represent 
two sorts of desires or cravings. The first of these 
are cravings of which we are aware, but which, be- 
cause they are "immoral," or socially detrimental, 
or difficult or impossible to gratify for some other 
reason, remain unacted upon. These are called 
"suppressed" desires. The second are cravings 
which we not only fail to gratify, but of whose very 
existence we are unaware. If someone were to 
suggest that we had such cravings we might even 
vehemently, and perhaps honestly, deny it. These 
are called "repressed" desires. 

Now, say the psychoanalysts, though we can sup- 
press or repress our cravings, we cannot annihilate 
them. To use one of their similes : "Whether we 
remain in ignorance of the fact that a boiler is full 
of steam or simply disregard that fact, the steam 
is there, seeking an outlet and likely to create an 
abnormal one, unless a normal outlet is provided." 

What will this "abnormal outlet" be? Accord- 



94 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

ing to the psychoanalysts, it may take several forms. 
"Between the compelling instinct and the opposing 
force of sexual denial," for instance, "the way is 
prepared for some disturbance which does not solve 
the conflict but seeks to escape it by changing the 
libidinous cravings into symptoms of disease." In 
other words, the suppression or repression of sexual 
cravings, they assert, will lead to anxiety dreams, 
nightmares, nervous disorders, intolerance, hallucin- 
ations, dual and multiple personalities, insanity, or 
burst out in abnormal sexual perversions of a 
revolting sort. They bring forth examples of 
perversions in great men. They point with a finger 
of warning at the ascetics and holy men and women 
who were fighting the flesh, and contend that these 
exchanged normal reality for hallucinations, and 
normal desires for perverse desires. 

And what cure do they suggest? Here I must 
be cautious, and warn the reader that the psycho- 
analysts do not altogether agree upon this matter 
among themselves. I will try, however, as best I 
may, to do justice to the bulk of their opinion. 

They believe, first, that we should be made 
conscious of our repressed cravings. To make the 
subject conscious of these, they interpret his acts, 
study his dreams, unravel the symbolism, and 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 95 

gradually inform the patient what his repressed 
cravings are. This is cutting the rope that holds 
the dead dog down. The first job is to bring him 
to the surface. 

Critics have feared that causing these uncon- 
scious cravings to rise to consciousness may cause 
them to overpower the patient's ethical strivings. 
The belief has also been expressed that this method 
may suggest a craving or put into the mind of 
the patient a harmful idea that was not there 
before. Freud, the originator and patron saint of 
psychoanalysis, has answered to the first criticism 
that a wish whose repression has failed is incom- 
parably stronger when it remain unconscious than 
when it is made conscious. The unconscious wish 
cannot be influenced and is not hindered by striv- 
ings in the opposite direction, while the conscious 
wish is inhibited by other conscious wishes of an 
opposite nature. I shall not take sides on this par- 
ticular argument, but shall merely content myself 
with presenting the two points of view, leaving 
the reader to judge of their merits for himself. 

When the unconscious craving is brought to the 
surface, what becomes of it and what is to be done 
with it? Partly, say the psychoanalysts, it is "con- 
sumed" and overpowered in the very act of bring- 



96 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

ing it up. Instead of being repressed, it is con- 
demned. The psychoanalyst may also suggest 
healthy and normal and socially beneficial or harm- 
less ways of gratifying it. 

But there is something further. It may, accord- 
ing to Freud, be "sublimated." By sublimation, 
Freud understands a process* which seeks to utilize 
the sexual energy, immobilized by repressions and 
set free by analysis, for higher purposes of a non- 
sexual nature. In other words, the components of 
the sexual energy can be made to exchange their 
sexual goal for one more remote and socially valu- 
able. "To the utilization of the energy reclaimed 
in such a way, in the activities of our mental life, 
we probably owe the highest cultural achievements. 
As long as an impulse is repressed, it cannot be 
sublimated. After the removal of the repression, 
the way to sublimation is open." 

All this is interesting and promising. But alas! 
The doctrine is violently criticized by many other 
psychoanalysts. "No normal craving," says one, 
"can be normally repressed. Nor can it be 
normally sublimated." And again: "The desir- 
ability of sublimation, except as a social conven- 
ience, remains to be proved." 

In fact, it is doubtful to just what extent Freud 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 97 

himself believed in this theory. In one of his lec- 
tures, he said: "If the repression of sexuality is 
pushed too far it amounts to a robbery committed 
against the organism." He concluded this lecture 
with a story. A village community kept a horse 
which was capable of an enormous amount of 
work. But the wiseacres thought that it was prov- 
ing too costly by consuming too much fodder. So 
they began to cut down its ration, day by day. 
It finally got so small that the horse was living on 
one stalk of hay a day, with apparently no ill 
effects. The next morning he was to be taken to 
work with no food at all. But on that morning 
he was found dead in his stall. The "sublimation" 
of his craving for food had been complete. 

The suggestion is plain. Freud is putting the de- 
sire for sexual gratification in the same category as 
the desire for food. I cannot see the justice for that ; 
and I am sorry, if, in pointing out his fallacy, I am 
obliged to utter a few platitudes. Food is absolutely 
essential to the life of the individual, from the day 
of birth. There is no one to deny it. Sexualit3% 
however essential to the continuation of the race, 
has no indispensable connection with the individual. 
No one has ever been known to live without food. 
How many have lived without sexual gratification 



98 - THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

no one can say ; but I have no doubt that the number, 
in its totality, has been amazingly large. 

The psychoanalysts point to monks and ordinary 
individuals who, attempting to deny the flesh, suf- 
fered from hallucinations or finally burst forth in 
abnormal perversions. Most of the examples they 
cite may be true. All of them may be true. But 
that would not prove their case. In order to do 
so, they would have to prove what the logicians 
call a universal negative. They would have to 
show that there has never been a case in which 
the flesh has been denied without physical injury 
or mental disturbance. Either that, or they would 
have to Supply overwhelming evidence to show that 
on a priori grounds such a thing is impossible. 
They have not done so. They have not come near 
doing so. And though it is impossible to prove 
beyond question of any given individual that he 
has not indulged in any sexual practice of any kind, 
yet there is abundant presumptive evidence that 
thousands of prominent churchmen, scientists, phil- 
osophers and quite ordinary individuals have suc- 
ceeded in absolute chastity and remained otherwise 
wholly "normal." 

And before going any further it would be well 
to call attention to a point of the highest impor- 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 99 

tance. Altogether apart from the truth of one 
belief or the other, we must consider the moral 
effect of the belief. If you believe that you cannot 
get along without sexual or any other particular 
gratification, then assuredly you will not be able 
to. But if you believe that you can get along with- 
out it, you may have won half the victory. What 
you believe in this respect will have an overwhelm- 
ing influence upon what you do. If you are con- 
vinced that "repression" or "suppression" will 
lead to mental torture or abnormal outlets, then 
this fear will be constantly before you. By think- 
ing that you have to yield, you will yield. But if 
you are confident that the desire can be success- 
fully fought, your confidence will vastly increase 
your strength to fight it. Whichever your belief, 
you will tend to make your belief true. One does 
not have to be a philosophic pragmatist to appre- 
ciate that. I hope I shall be forgiven for a liberal 
use of italics and repetition on this point: I think 
they are necessary. 

There is another question in regard to this 
matter. What is a "normal" craving? The psy- 
choanalysts (and perhaps they are not alone in 
this) apparently put the sexual desire on all fours 
with the desire for food. But the satisfaction of 



100 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

the desire for food does not result in any reaction. 
It does not weaken a man. It does not depress. 
It does not enervate. It does not exhaust. And 
here we should draw a sharp distinction between 
two words that up to now I have been using almost 
interchangeably. I refer to the distinction between 
a desire and a crazing. AVe have a desire for food, 
but a craving for cigarettes, whiskey, morphine. 
The first fills a positive need and gives a positive 
satisfaction. The second is largely negative; it 
may give a positive satisfaction at the beginning, 
but in its later stages, especially if one becomes a 
cigarette or a morphine fiend or a dipsomaniac, it 
merely relieves a sense of discomfort, agony, or 
torture, from which one who is not an addict is 
wholly free. 

Is the sexual craving a "normal" craving simply 
because it is inborn, while a craving for tobacco, 
alcohol or opium is abnormal because it is acquired? 
But if this distinction is valid, of what real prac- 
tical importance is it so far as the individual is 
concerned? Surely the acquired craving may be 
fully as intense and overwhelming as the "normal'' 
craving. People who do not believe this may 
ponder these examples quoted by Dr. Mussey: 

"A few years ago a tippler was put into an 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 101 

almshouse in this State (Ohio). Within a few 
days he had devised various expedients to procure 
rum, but failed. At length, however, he hit upon 
one which was successful. He went into the wood- 
yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon 
the block, and with an axe in the other struck it 
off at a single blow. With the stump raised and 
streaming he ran into the house and cried, 'Get 
some rum ! get some rum ! My hand is off !' In 
the confusion and bustle of the occasion a bowl of 
rum was brought, into which he plunged the bleed- 
ing member of his body, then raising the bowl to 
his mouth, drank freely, and exultingly exclaimed, 
'Now I am satisfied.' Dr. J. E. Turner tells of a 
man who, while under treatment for inebriety, 
during four weeks secretly drank the alcohol from 
six jars containing morbid specimens. On asking 
him why he had committed this loathsome act, he 
replied: 'Sir, it is as impossible for me to control 
this diseased appetite as it is for me to control the 
pulsations of my heart.' " 

Do the psychoanalysts, or does anyone else, 
believe that it is impossible to fight a craving of 
this sort, and that there is nothing to be done but 
give in to it? I do not think so. But if a craving 
of this intensity can be fought, why not the so-called 



102 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

"normal" craving? What would the psychoanalysts 
consider a "normal outlet" for a "normal" craving? 
Just how frequent would indulgence in a given 
"normal" appetite have to be in order to be a 
"normal outlet?" Will the psychoanalysts, or any- 
one else, deny that indulgence in itself develops 
and increases a craving? Surely the psychoanalysts 
are the first to declare that abnormal perversions 
of the sexual instinct are acquired, that they began 
and developed because the sexual instinct orginally 
took a wrong turn, and were intensified because that 
was persisted in. But when one has admitted all 
this, one has come rather close to admitting the un- 
questionable truth that the sexual craving, as it 
appears in the adult human being, is itself, in the in- 
tensity and particular form it takes, very largely an 
"acquired" craving. 

Let us grant the psychoanalysts' contention that 
an attempt to fight the sexual craving, as it has 
become developed, may involve mental anxiety, and 
even, if the craving be powerful enough, mental 
torture for a time. Would not the struggle against 
the craving for drink, developed to the intensity 
in the dipsomaniacs just cited, or even in far less 
intensity, also involve mental anxiety and torture? 
Any conquest or act of will worth while involves 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 103 

that. If there were no price attached to will- 
power, it could be had for the asking. 

One last argument may be urged in support of 
the "normality" of the sexual desire as opposed to 
other cravings. It may be alleged that, while in 
its developed and actual adult form, the sexual 
passion is largely or partly an acquired one (its 
form and intensity depending to a great extent 
upon early environment, imitation, decisions at 
critical times, frequency of indulgence), yet the 
organism is endowed with an instinctive propensity 
without which the sexual craving as developed 
would never have come into existence. This is 
true. I have not denied it. But if it is true of 
the sexual desire, it is true of every other desire. 
It is true of the developed craving for rum, for 
opium, for morphine, for overindulgence in cig- 
arettes or even in candy, or for mere gluttony. 
The formation of these cravings is possible because 
the organism has certain instinctive propensities. 
Men do not usually form passions for ink-drinking, 
or for molten lead, or for eating gravel, because 
the organism has no instinctive propensity for these 
things. Every desire whatever, no matter how 
perverted or injurious, is the finished product made 
from the raw materials of instinctive propensities. 



104 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

There are no other finished products, because there 
are no other raw materials to make them with. 

Reduced to its lowest terms, stripped of its 
scientific pretensions and its pseudo-scientific 
trappings and terminology, boiled down from a 
ponderous literature into a single sentence, the 
contention of the psychoanalysts was long ago 
expressed in the epigram of Oscar Wilde: "The 
only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield 
to it." 

It would be unfair to intimate that this epigram 
accounted for Oscar Wilde's own private char- 
acter and sexual practice, and I will not do so. 
If he thought of his private character at all when 
he penned it, the epigram may possibly have been 
considered by him as a justification of his course; 
but this would not mean that it was a cause. The 
ethical philosophy of most men is a system of 
apologetics; it is a result of their own conduct 
rather than a cause and determinant of it. But 
all these considerations aside. Let us judge the 
epigram on its intrinsic merits. 

Like all good epigrams, it is at least true in a 
special sense. And the sense in which the epigram 
is true is that if you yield to a temptation, you 
will get rid of it for the moment. That is all the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 105 

truth there is in it. For the very fact that you 
have yielded to the temptation will make it return 
at a later time with increased power and urgency. 
Every time you yield to it, you do two things : you 
increase the intensity of the desire and lessen the 
power of resistance. You form a habit of yield- 
ing. You form a habit of yielding not only 
to that, but to all other cravings — and we have 
learned what habits are. You develop and strength- 
en the craving by use, just as you develop a muscle 
by use. The parallel is exact. In exercising your 
muscles, you temporarily fatigue them and wear 
them down. But this very breaking down of tissues 
calls nutrition into the worn muscles, and when the 
fatigue is past, and the processes of repair have 
been completed, the muscles are all the harder and 
stronger. 

On the other hand, every time you resist a desire 
you strengthen your power to resist. Every desire 
grows by gratification. Feed the desire, it will 
fatten and grow great; starve it, it will greatly 
weaken. It may even die of inanition. This is 
the true application of Freud's story of the horse. 
The common experience, not of neurotics and 
paranoiacs, but of mankind in general, proves this 
over and over again. It does not need laboratory 



106 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

experiments or elaborate psychiatry to demon- 
strate it. 

It ought not to be necessary, but to shield my 
remarks from misconstruction and misrepresenta- 
tion, I want to defend myself against any taint of 
puritanism in the invidious sense in which the 
psychoanalysts and Mr. H. L. Mencken use that 
word. I do not denounce the sexual act as immoral 
in itself. I do not declaim against the gratification 
of the sexual passions in what the psychoanalysts 
call a "normal married life," provided that grati- 
fication is continent, and does not reach the point 
where it undermines or endangers physical and 
nervous and mental health and well-being. But I 
do contend that if, through economic or other cir- 
cumstances, or disinclination, or inability to fall in 
love, a man either does not marry or delays 
marriage, it is perfectly possible for him to lead 
an absolutely chaste and normal life; and of two 
unmarried men having equal sexual propensities 
to begin with, the man who voluntarily restrains 
them the more is the stronger and the better 
character. 

I am merely making this one point : that die sexual 
craving can be fought, that it can be lived down, 
that it can be conquered, and that the conquest of 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 107 

it would immensely strengthen the character, and 
make most other moral victories comparatively 
easy. I hold to the ideal of Huxley, of a man 
"who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but 
whose passions are trained to come to heel by a 
vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience." 
Perhaps there are psychoanalysts who will agree 
with all this. Perhaps there are psychoanalysts who 
will protest against my fulminations, saying they 
do not hold the views I attribute to them, that I 
either do not understand their views or that I wil- 
fully distort them. If I have been unfair, if I 
have through lack of discrimination blamed all 
psychoanalysts for the faults of a few, if I have 
unjustly damned the leaders for the views dissem- 
inated by ardent but muddle-headed and ignorant 
disciples, I am sorry. I have meant only to assault 
a particular idea. I have tried to be fair; and 
wherever possible I have taken the psychoanalysts' 
own words to state their position. But whatever 
the psychoanalysts do or do not teach, there is no 
doubt at all about the popular impression of what 
they teach, and the popular impression (which is 
the all-important thing) is that they believe it not 
only impossible to conquer the sexual passion, but 
highly dangerous to try. 



108 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

This vicious doctrine existed long before the 
psychoanalysts, but the present menace is that 
psychoanalysis may foster and encourage it, by 
seeming to lend it scientific foundation and support. 
The doctrine must be utterly demolished, and every- 
thing that appears to offer it respectworthy standing 
must be examined and exposed. This is all I have 
attempted to do. 



XII 



CONCENTRATION 



HpHUS far I have spoken of the breaking and 
■■- forming of habits, and of the acquisition of 
will-power ; but for the most part I have given only 
scattered hints on what to do with your will-power 
after you have it. Most of these hints have been 
negative; they have talked of the avoidance of 
certain acts; and where they have been positive, 
where they have talked of the performance of acts, 
they have been altogether lofty and abstract. We 
have now to descend from the empyrean of gen- 
eralities to the forest of details. 

Your ultimate ends and yearnings I shall, for 
the moment, take for granted. I assume that you 
know what you want, that you have definite ideas 
on where the treasure of happiness is buried, and 
that you merely seek aid in securing the implements 
to dig for it. Your aim in life may be wealth, 
power, fame, or a partnership in the lime and 
cement business. Assuming its existence, whatever 

109 



110 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

it may be, and the willingness also to pay the price 
for it, we have now to inquire how the price is to 
be paid. 

Your effort of will is not thrown out all at once. 
You are not asked to pay cash down in full. You 
are permitted — nay, you are obliged — to pay for 
your end in installments, in relatively small efforts 
of will. But these efforts of will must be continu- 
ous and sustained. If you miss a payment, the 
penalty imposed will be exorbitant, and you will 
have to make a much greater total payment in the 
end. On the other hand, if your payments are 
made promptly, you will find the amount called 
for diminishing all the time. 

With most ends, one of the requisities will be 
the acquisition of knowledge — whether one's ulti- 
mate purpose be material success or the pure search 
for Truth. The acquisition of this knowledge will 
require thought and study, and thought and study 
will require concentration. 

Now this concentration will be mainly of two 
kinds — what I shall call minute-to-minute concen- 
tration, and what I shall call night-after-night con- 
centration. Minute-to-minute concentration is the 
ability to keep your mind upon a certain subject for 
a given period, say for ten minutes, one-half hour 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 111 

or two hours, without interruption. Night-after- 
night concentration is the ability to specialize in a 
certain subject or in a certain branch of that sub- 
ject until you have mastered it thoroughly, before 
advancing to other subjects. 

Ere I go further I may have to justify the con- 
sideration of this question by asserting that con- 
centration is primarly an act of will. It need not 
necessarily be so, any more than any other good 
or noble or success-forwarding act need be an act 
of will. If you enjoy working, getting up early, 
remaining home nights, staying sober, you will do 
so without effort. If you are interested in a book 
or in a particular subject, you will read it or 
meditate upon it without effort. But you need will- 
power in action precisely because you do not enjoy 
doing these commendable things, and you need will- 
power in reading, thought or writing precisely be- 
cause your mind will otherwise be distracted by lack 
or lapses of interest in the subject at hand or by 
greater interest in something else. 

Now when you take up the sublime task of train- 
ing the mind to concentrate, you must remember 
that the act of will involved is the same in principle 
as any other act of will. Before you begin, you 
must be certain in your own mind that the end is 



112 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

worth while. There is a price attached to concen- 
tration, as there is to anything of value. Concen- 
tration is not a beautifully abstract quality of mind. 
yVe cannot concentrate in general. The very word 
concentration implies specialization; it means con- 
centrating on some particular thing, and when we 
devote all or most of our time and attention to one 
particular subject, we must necessarily have less 
time for other subjects. In other words, we must 
be content to remain somewhat ignorant of them, 
at least for a time. 

This applies particularly to night after night 
concentration. If you devote one evening's study 
to the quantity theory of money, the next evening 
to the problem of the freedom of the will, the next 
to incidents in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 
next to historic types of lampshades, your mind 
may eventually become an interesting depository of 
stray bits of knowledge, arousing the same sort of 
quaint enjoyment in the minds of your associates 
as an old curiosity shop, or a second-hand book- 
store in which yellow-backed novels of passion and 
intrigue rub shoulders with scientific treatises and 
religious sermons. 

But such miscellaneous reading is not helping 
you in any ultimate purpose. You are getting no- 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 113 

where. You will become neither an economist, nor 
an ethicist, nor a man versed in biography, nor 
anything else describable with a complimentary 
name. By trying to know something about every- 
thing, you will not only miss knowing everything 
about something, but you may miss really knowing 
anything about anything. Your mind may miss 
the one advantage of an old curiosity shop — that 
the pieces of furniture in it, though they may not 
match each other, are at least in themselves complete. 
If you give only one or two evenings to a subject, 
your knowledge of it may be as useless as a chair 
with two legs. But if you are willing to realize 
that any useful knowledge whatever requires 
specialization, that it means keeping evening after 
evening on the same subject; if you take pride in 
really knowing something about something, then 
you will be willing to remain ignorant of certain 
subjects, at least for a given time. Even if, like 
Bacon, you take all human knowledge as your 
province, you must remember that even a traveler 
who circles the globe can go to only one place at 
one time. 

I have spoken here only of keeping to one 
subject on those evenings on which you do choose 
to study. I have not spoken of the evenings given 



114 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

to other things. It may not be advisable to give 
six or seven evenings a week to study. One needs 
one's play to keep from going stale. But there are 
limits even to this principle. No man will become 
an Aristotle or a Duns Scotus on an evening a 
week. "Most careers," remarked a newspaper writer 
recently, "are made or marred in the hours after 
supper." 

.What applies to night-after-night concentration 
applies with much greater force to minute-to-minute 
concentration. If the mind is ever to accomplish 
anything useful, it must be able to keep itself for 
a reasonable time on a given subject. The very 
completion of a train of thought on any subject 
whatsoever depends upon it. And the rules are 
the same old rules. You must first be fully certain 
in your own mind that the end is worth while. For 
when you are upon any given train of thought, you 
will find new paths opening up on either side, 
pleasant paths, paths that seem to lead to worth- 
while destinations, paths you are tempted to 
explore. But you must force yourself to keep on 
the road that you began. You must first get to 
the end of that. You may make mental note of 
these potential digressions, to return to them at 
some later time; or if you fear you are going to 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 115 

forget them, you may make written note of them 
as they suggest themselves. 

Concentration is not a virtue in itself. The 
value of concentration depends entirely on the value 
of the subject concentrated upon. The only qual- 
ification to this remark is that it may often be 
better really to concentrate upon a less important 
subject than to play and dabble with a more impor- 
tant one; for the less important subject, if con- 
centrated upon, will at least be mastered. 

I have dealt with this subject of concentration 
rather extensively in a former book, Thinking as a 
Science. It was there treated mainly from the 
standpoint of the intellect; here it must be treated 
from the standpoint of the will; but as the two 
cannot really be kept separate, and as I would only 
be likely to repeat myself anyway, I take the liberty 
of doing so openly : 

"Much of our mind wandering is due to the 
fact that we are not fully convinced of the impor- 
tance of the problem being attacked, or that we 
regard other problems or ideas as more important. 
Concentration consists in devoting one's mind to 
the solution of one problem. During our train of 
thought associations bring up new ideas or suggest 
problems which do not bear on the question at 



116 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

hand. Now when we wander, wnen we tollow up 
these irrelevant ideas or suggested problems, or 
when we happen to glance at something or hear 
something and begin to think of that, we do so 
because of a half-conscious belief that the new 
idea, problem or fact needs attending to, is impor- 
tant. I have already pointed out that if this new 
idea is important it will be so only by accident. 
If we were consciously to ask ourselves whether 
any of these irrelevant problems were as important 
as the one we were concentrating upon, or even 
important at all, we should find, nine times out of 
ten, that they were not." 

Mind-wandering is only a habit. It must be 
broken just like other bad habits. "But," I hear 
you say, "all this is beyond my control. I can't 
keep my mind on a book when somebody insists 
on talking in the same room. I can't write any- 
thing when the family in the apartment upstairs 
plays the victrola. I can't keep myself to a train 
of thought with constant interruptions!" 

But, with all due respect to you, and with full 
realization of the risk I run of losing your respect, 
1 insist that you can. You have done it. Certain 
allowances must always be made for the unspeak- 
able noises that other people make, but you can 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 117 

ignore them easily enough when the time comes. 
Can you not recall, when, as a boy, you read the ad- 
ventures of Jack Harkaway and the Chinamen, so 
that you became unconscious of the very room in 
which you were sitting? Has the memory of the 
smile given you by a certain wonderful girl never 
come between you and a very prosaic ledger, obliter- 
ating the figures as completely as if they were the 
fancy and the smile the reality? Has your wife never 
had to ask you a question two or three times at 
dinner before you answered, simply because you 
were completely wrapped up in some thought of a 
business unpleasantry that day, and did not know 
that she had spoken? All these forms of involun- 
tary concentration, of which you were not con- 
scious, were possible because the interest in the 
subject was intense enough. 

Poverty in freshness of idea and in varied 
expression tempts me again to quote from myself: 

"Whenever a person is left alone for a short 
time, with no one to talk to and no 'reading matter' ; 
when for instance, he is standing at a station 
waiting for his train, or sitting at a restaurant 
table waiting for his order, or hanging on a sub- 
way strap when he has forgotten to buy a news- 
paper, his 'thoughts' tend to run along the tracks 



118 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

they have habitually taken. If a young man usually 
allows a popular tune to float through his head, 
that will be most likely to happen; if he usually 
thinks of that young lady, he will most likely think 
of her then; if he has often imagined himself as 
some great political orator making a speech amid 
the plaudits of the multitude, he is likely to see a 
mental picture of himself swinging his arms, waving 
flags and gulping water. 

"The only way a man can put a stop to such 
pleasant but uneducative roamings, is to snap off 
his train of day-dreaming the first moment he 
becomes aware of it, and to address his mind to 
some useful serious subject. His thoughts will be 
almost sure to leak away again. They may do 
this as often as fifteen times in half an hour. But 
the second he becomes aware of it, he should dam 
up the stream and send his thoughts along the 
channel he has laid out for them. If he has never 
done this, he will find the effort great. But if he 
merely resolves now that the next time his mind 
wanders he shall stop it in this manner, his resolve 
will tend to make itself felt. If he succeeds in 
following this practice once, it will be much easier 
a second time. Every time he does this it will 
become increasingly easy, until he will have arrived 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 119 

at the point where his control over his thoughts 
will be almost absolute. Not only will it be increas- 
ingly easy for him to turn his mind to serious 
subjects. It will become constantly more pleasur- 
able. Frivolous and petty trains of thought will 
become more and more intolerable." 



XIII 

A PROGRAM OF WORK 

MOST of us live in the Street of By-and-By. 
We honestly intend to do certain things, and 
for some strange reason we keep on intending to do 
them. There is nothing specially difficult about 
them. They demand no gritting of teeth, no heroic 
sacrifice. They are simply not as pleasant as certain 
other things. They do not have to be done until 
a certain time, or perhaps there is no particular time 
at all at which they have to be done. They can be 
done just as well tomorrow as today. So we put 
them off till tomorrow — that tragic tomorrow that 
never comes. We become members of what one 
writer has called the "Going To" family. We enlist 
in the Army of the Procrastinators. 

The worst of it is, that many of us do not look 
upon the doing of these numberless small tasks as 
anything requiring will-power at all, simply because 
they do not come in the teeth-gritting class. We 
intend to do them, and we are apt to think that our 
intention of doing them makes them as good as 
120 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 121 

done. We are like the habitual cigarette smoker 
who tells you he could quit at any time— the thing 
has no hold on him — only he doesn't want to quit. 
t When we find that many of these little tasks are 
going by default, many of us, instead of blaming 
ourselves, indulge in a great deal of self-pity at 
our lack of time. But a few of us catch glimpses 
of the truth; we suspect that we are not as efficient 
as we might be; we may even suspect that our 
procrastination has something to do with lack of 
will-power. These two suspicions are correct. 

Aside from any moral benefit, it would be an 
untold blessing in itself if we could get these things 
done — if we had, for instance, a private secretary 
who would work for the mere honor of it and 
would not have even to receive instructions. I refer 
to such tasks as writing personal letters to friends; 
working off letters that you "owe" to people; pay- 
ing bills ; sending in your coupons to collect interest 
on a bond; taking a pair of shoes around to be 
half-soled, or calling for a pair you left there; 
sorting out the old papers in your desk; bringing 
neatness out of chaos ... I need not elaborate 
further. You have probably been already reminded 
unpleasantly of some concrete tasks. 

These tasks are not performed by intentions to 



122 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

perform them. The first requisite is to set a definite 
time for them, and to allow nothing to make you 
postpone that time. Instead of saying, "I will 
have to write Fred; I really must write Fred; it's 
a shame how long I've been putting it off," you 
will say, "I will write Fred next Tuesday," or "I 
will write to Fred not later than next Tuesday/' 
And you will keep a desk calendar or some other 
form of reminder, and your promise to yourself 
you will regard as sacred. 

Now it may not make a great deal of difference 
to Fred whether he gets your letter next Tuesday 
or whether he does not get it until two weeks from 
next Tuesday. But it will make a great deal of 
difference to you. You will be disciplining your- 
self morally. You will be building up a will. 
Beware of curling your lip because these tasks are 
individually insignificant. The most imposing 
edifices that humanity has constructed (if I must 
be eloquent) have been built only by little brick 
on little brick. Moreover, you will find that these 
little tasks are getting themselves done. You will 
live a completer life, free from the ever-present 
preoccupation of tasks unfinished. And you will 
experience the peculiarly delightful gratification 
that comes from a sense of efficiency. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 123 

Note that there is nothing rigid or brittle about 
such a program. You may not want to write Fred 
immediately after you get his letter, for you may 
not want the correspondence to be too frequent. 
But by marking a certain definite time you can do 
what you had not previously done. 

A program of work may be laid out for the 
year, for the week, for the day or for the hour; 
or one program may be contained within the other. 
You should lay out your longest-range program 
first, for that will define the direction and scope of 
your efforts. The nature of this long program will 
depend upon your ultimate purposes in life. Your 
aim may simply be general culture, but even in 
this instance you will realize that haphazard reading 
is of little value, and you will draw up a list of 
books to be "covered" that year. Or you may 
decide that specialization would be more beneficial, 
and you may say to yourself : "For the following 
year I will devote my evenings to the study of 
money and banking," or you may decide to make it 
the history of English literature, or the apprecia- 
tion of painting and a critical knowledge of the 
great masters. 

Having thus defined your efforts for the year, 
so that you know exactly the goal to which you 



124 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

are heading, you may come directly to a plan for 
the week. You may decide that two or three hours 
should be given to your study or improvement on 
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evenings; 
or you may, if you think you have the will-power, 
allow for something "turning up" on one of those 
nights, and simply set aside any four evenings a 
week. I insert the phrase "if you think you have 
the will-power" because this more elastic plan does, 
paradoxically, require more will-power than the 
more rigid program. On Monday and Tuesday 
something is likely to turn up — you may be tempted 
to go to a moving picture, some friend may suggest 
bridge — and knowing that your program does not 
tie you down to Monday or Tuesday, you may 
accede; but you will find yourself paying for it 
heavily at the end of the week; and four evenings 
in succession, especially if they include Saturday 
evening, may strain your will-power to the breaking 
point. Moreover, in making engagements ahead 
you are likely to over-commit yourself. 

"I suppose I could learn it just as well at home 
as by going to night-school," you have often heard 
people say, "but I find that I can't study at home." 
Here is proof that home-study requires more will- 
power than going to night-school; yet night-school 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 125 

is far more rigid, both in its evenings a week, and 
in its hours during those evenings, than home-study 
could possibly be. It is precisely because of this 
rigidity that night-school is easier to attend. 

But a further element must also be admitted. 
It is much easier to say to a friend: "I'm sorry; 
I'd like to go. But I have to go to night-school," 
than it is to say, "I'm sorry; but I have to — stay 
home and study." Your friend is likely to be 
skeptical. For some reason he may be unable to 
see that an obligation to yourself is quite as sacred 
as an obligation to others. And once he finds that 
your program is elastic, your case is doomed. 
Study, if you must, on evenings when others would 
like to have you go out, but not when he would. 
This is his attitude; and it is going to take all 
your resources of tact to meet it. Moreover, the 
truth must be told: we are ashamed of having 
our friends discover that we are seeking self-im- 
provement. That is why we shrink from confessing 
our real reasons. 

Your first tendency, doubtless, especially in 
drawing up any program of work or of little 
things to do in a single night, will be to plan too 
much. You will find yourself greatly underestimat- 
ing the time it takes you to perform a particular 



126 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

task, or greatly overestimating the number of 
tasks you can perform. A program is valuable if 
for no other reason than that it brings out, as noth- 
ing else could, how you have been frittering away 
your time before you started to formulate programs. 
Even if you do not live up to your schedule, you 
will probably get more work done than you would 
have without one. But it is bad policy habitually 
to overplan. You may arrive at the point where 
you will not even expect to live up to your scheme. 
It is much easier for the discipline of will-power 
to plan modestly and to carry out your schedule 
than to plan greatly and fail. The first builds 
self-confidence; the second destroys it. 



XIV 



THE DAILY CHALLENGE 



XI 71LL-P0WER, in its highest sense, is asso- 
* * ciated with the Napoleons, the Robert Braces, 
and the Luthers. We connect it either with great 
historic characters, men of action who have shaken 
the world, or with the noble and almost incredible 
sacrifices of the Christian martyrs. 

Will-power in the heroic sense is not dead. If 
any one had ever thought so, he must have stopped 
believing so in 1914. Millions of men went forth 
to die for their faith, and seven million dead on 
the battlefield are seven million crushing answers to 
the cynic. If men will show such will for their 
country, they will show even more for their religious 
faith. Lest we forget the sacrifices of a former 
age, let me quote a few extracts from Taine's 
account, taken from Noailles, Fox, Neal, and other 
sources : 

"In three years, under Mary, nearly three hun- 
dred persons, men, women, old and young, some all 

127 



128 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

but children, allowed themselves to be burned alive 
rather than abjure. . . . ' 'No one will be crowned,' 
said one of them, 'but they who fight like men; 
and he who endures to the end shall be saved.' 
Doctor Rogers was burned first, in presence of his 
wife and ten children, one at the breast. He had 
not been told beforehand, and was sleeping soundly. 
The wife of the keeper of Newgate woke him, and 
told him that he must burn that day. 'Then,' said 
he, 'I need not truss my points.' In the midst of 
the flames he did not seem to suffer. 'His children 
stood by consoling him, in such a way that he 
looked as if they were conducting him to a merry 
marriage.' . . . Thomas Tomkins, a weaver of 
Shoreditch, being asked by Bishop Bonner if he 
could stand the fire well, bade him try it. 'Bonner 
took Tomkins by the fingers, and held his hand 
directly over the flame,' to terrify him. But 'he 
never shrank, till the veins and the sinews burst, 
and the water (blood) did spirt in Mr. Harpsfield's 
face.' Bishop Hooper was burned three times over 
in a small fire of green wood. There was too little 
wood, and the wind turned aside the smoke. He 
cried out, 'For God's love, good people, let me 
have more fire.' Mis legs and thighs were roasted; 
one of his hands fell off before he expired; he 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 129 

endured this three-quarters of an hour ; before him 
in a box was his pardon, on condition that he would 
retract." 

Such examples, with all their horror, are a mighty 
inspiration. They are examples of pure will. We 
do not know what part of the astounding achieve- 
ments of Napoleon to assign to his will and what 
part to the intellect which was its servant. The 
fortitude of these martyrs was a fortitude made 
possible by the will alone. 

But however inspiring may be such examples, 
we must guard against connecting our conception 
of will-power too closely with them. If we place 
our conception of will-power too high, we are in 
danger of failing to recognize it in its humbler 
forms. The opportunity seldom comes when the 
will is put to such a test, or anything remotely 
approaching such a test. 

The writers of the magazine advertisements for 
the will-power courses conceive a man of will- 
power as a man who "gets on," an E. H. Harri- 
man or a J. P. Morgan, a dominant personality, 
who must assume leadership and power ; who bends 
others to his will, or breaks them if they will not 
bend; who gets to his goal, if need be, over dead 
bodies, but who gets to his goal. This is an elevat- 



130 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

ing conception, but the average man of talent is apt 
to find it a trifle unreal and beside the point after 
he has finished Lesson One that evening and gone 
to work the next day. He is resolved to mow down 
all opposition, but when he gets to the office he 
finds no opposition. Everybody says Good Morn- 
ing, pleasantly, though a few wonder vaguely why 
he has set his jaw so tightly. If he is a bookkeeper, 
he goes to his ledger and finds the same columns 
of figures to add up, the same elusive discrepancies 
to straighten out; and you can't use will-power on 
figures, because they wouldn't understand it. You 
can only use will-power on persons. But if he is 
a sales clerk he cannot "dominate" the customers: 
he must be pleasant and tactful. He might tell 
the floor-walker what he really thought of him, and 
that might give satisfaction to the soul, but it would 
be of doubtful value in getting ahead in business. 
And even a bank or a railroad president meets day 
after day the same routine problems, many of which 
involve heavy responsibility, shrewd and mature 
judgment, and sometimes a good deal of thought, 
but hardly will-power. 

The need for will-power thus seems a distant 
need, which arises perhaps one day in a hundred. 
or one in a thousand. In fact, some people seem 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 131 

to feel that there are no outlets for will-power in 
this workaday world, unless you go out of your 
way to create them. This appears to be the opinion 
of no less a thinker than William James, who writes 
in his Psychology : 

"Keep the faculty o£ effort alive in you by a 
little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be 
systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary 
points, do every day or two something for no other 
reason than that you would rather not do it, so that 
when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may 
find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the 
test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance 
which a. man pays on his house and goods. The 
tax does him no good at the time, and possibly 
never brings a return. But if the fire does come, 
his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. 
So with the man who has daily inured himself to 
habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, 
and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will 
stand like a tower when everything rocks around 
him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are win- 
nowed like chaff in the blastj' 

This is a noble passage, but I cannot accept James' 
implied view that daily life gives so few oppor- 
tunities for the real exercise of will. Our whole 



132 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

modern journey from the incubator to the crema- 
torium is taken in laps of twenty-four hours each; 
each divided sharply from the other; each with its 
routine much like the other; but each with its own 
challenge. And our way of meeting that challenge 
from day to day is our way of meeting the whole 
challenge of life. Every day we are faced w r ith a 
challenge, sometimes large, often small, but it is 
always there if we but face it. We do not have 
to create it. We do not have to do unnecessary 
things. And if we meet it, we pay a premium for 
which we receive a return, and sometimes a hand- 
some one, whether our house burn down or not. 

One test of whether you have met this challenge 
or not is in the way you feel at the end of the day. 
If you have met it, you will be rewarded with a 
glow of soul. If you have evaded or postponed it, 
your lot will be a sense of guilt. It may be ever so 
slight, but it will always be there, an uneasiness, like 
dirt in a corner. 

I have already mentioned the little daily duties 
that most of us put off or leave undone. But 
there are duties of a more serious sort, duties that 
require one not only to overcome laziness but to 
surmount moral fear. Principal among these are 
unpleasant interviews. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 133 

Let us take the very practical matter of asking 
for a raise. You think you are worth more money. 
You know you are. You have always known it. 
You have been waiting long enough for the boss 
to find it out, but the boss has proved either singu- 
larly stupid or singularly selfish, and you have 
determined either to enlighten him or to uplift him 
spiritually. Your mind is fully made up. 

But though your mind was made up a week ago, 
you haven't asked him yet because on one day you 
had a mountain of work that had to be shovelled 
out of the way, and on the next you had been out 
late the night before and didn't feel equal to an 
interview, and on the next you didn't look very 
neat, and on the next you were waiting for some 
mistake of yours to "blow over," and on the next 
the boss wasn't in a good mood. In fact, you will 
tell yourself anything except that you didn't have 
the courage. 

And yet to put off such an interview, when you 
have fully determined that it must be had, is like 
putting off getting up in the morning, or putting 
off diving into cold water when you have gone down 
for a swim. The longer you stand on the diving 
board the colder the water seems to get, the more 
terrifying becomes the height at which you are 



134 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

standing from it. There is a psychological theory 
that emotion follows action, and not action emotion ; 
that you do not run away from a bear because a 
fear seizes you, but that fear seizes you because 
you are running away. Whatever of truth there 
may be in this, it is certainly true that though you 
may hesitate because you fear to dive, you also fear 
to dive because you hesitate; and the like applies 
to interviewing the boss for an increase. 

Here again I do not suggest inflexibility. It is 
sometimes better to do a certain thing in the future ; 
but if you really mean to do it at all, I insist upon 
fixing a definite time. 

Another challenge which is apt to occur once or 
twice on almost any day is the necessity for pro- 
nouncing that most difficult of all words for the 
tongue — No. A friend who has drifted from one 
job to another, finally becomes a salesman for oil 
stock, and wants you to "invest" in it; another 
wants to borrow money; another wants you to go 
into partnership with him ; another wants you to 
spend with him an evening that you have set aside 
for study; another offers you a drink after you 
have signed the pledge. When you are with a young 
lady, a professional beggar, whom you privately 
suspect to be a fraud, an idler and a parasite, perhaps 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 135 

better off than you are, asks you for just a little 
silver change. 

The answer you would like to give in each case 
is No. Yet you fear to give offense; you fear to 
jeopardize your friendship; you fear a nasty 
retort; you fear having to defend your position; 
you fear embarrassment. Often by refusing with- 
out unkindness, but with firmness and candor and 
tact, you can reduce giving offense to a minimum, 
but it is idle to imagine that you can altogether 
avoid it. That part which is altogether unavoidable 
must be faced courageously. A man cannot respect 
himself if he grants a request or gives money to a 
beggar not because he believes the request is fair, 
or to relieve the beggar's distress, but simply because 
he cannot look his supplicant in the eye and tell 
him No. And the necessity for saying No is a 
daily necessity, an unpleasant duty that you do not 
have to go out of your way to find. 

To add to all this, as a daily exercise for will- 
power, there is always the infinitude of bad habits 
to be broken and of good habits to be formed. As 
a mere specific example, a cold shower every 
morning, if you are physically fitted for it, is an 
excellent will exercise, which more than pays for 
itself in its effects upon your health. 



XV 

SECOND AND THIRD WINDS 

\T TE have dealt with the humbler tasks. We 
» * come now to the tasks that are not so 
humble. .We have considered how we may perform 
our routine duties. But men of a higher stamp, 
men with an aim in life, men who want to mean 
something, are not satisfied with merely perform- 
ing routine duties. They aspire to something 
nobler and more soul-stirring. Not content with 
fulfilling the duties the world lays upon them, they 
want to lay upon themselves duties to fulfill. Per- 
haps, with Bernard Shaw, they feel that the true 
joy in life is "the being used for a purpose recog- 
nized by yourself as a mighty one; the being 
thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on 
the scrap-heap; the being a force of Nature instead 
of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and 
grievances, complaining that the world will not 
devote itself to making you happy." 

An ideal like that in itself will exalt a man, and 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 137 

give part of the strength needed for its own 
realization. But it carries with it a great danger. 
This is the danger that the ideal, instead of finding 
its outlet in action, may evaporate into day-dreams 
and gorgeous intentions whose date for fulfillment 
is always set at some vague time in the future. 
As a preliminary antidote for such a danger, I 



Lose this day loitering — 'twill be the same story 
Tomorrow — and the next more dilatory. 
Then indecision brings its own delays 
And days are lost lamenting over days. 
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute — 
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. 
Courage has genius, power and magic in it ; 
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated — 
Begin it and the work will be completed. 

What Goethe saw so powerfully, William James 
saw later, and elaborated the idea in a theory which 
goes beyond even this. That theory appeared in an 
essay called "The Energies of Men." In all 
English and American literature there is nothing 
of its short length — a mere thirty-five pages — so 
calculated to inspire a man with a passion for work. 
It is published in his Memories and Studies, (Long- 



138 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

mans, Green) and separately. By all means, read 
it. Read it, if you can, before your next meal. If 
it does not inspire you with a passion to go out 
immediately and do something large and glorious, 
you are probably not normal. 

Every sentence and illustration of that essay is 
so indispensable and full of meaning, that I can- 
not hope to give you any summary, or the "gist" 
of it. I can, however, give you a premonition of 
what it is about, and this itself can best be done, 
for the most part, in James's own words : 

"Everyone knows what it is," he says, "to start 
a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, 
feeling stale. And everybody knows what it is to 
'warm up' to his job. The process of warming up 
gets particularly striking in the phenomenon 
known as 'second wind.' On usual occasions we 
make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon 
as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) 
of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or 
worked 'enough,' so we desist. That amount of 
fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of 
which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual 
necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising 
thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain 
critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 139 

away, and we are fresher than before. We have 
evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked 
until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. 
There may be layer after layer of this experience. 
A third and fourth 'wind' may supervene. Mental 
activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, 
and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the 
very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease 
and power that 1 we never dreamed ourselves to 
own, — sources of strength habitually not taxed at 
all, because habitually we never push through the 
obstruction, never pass those early critical points." 

For many years James mused upon the phenom- 
enon of second wind, trying to find a physiological 
theory. It is evident, he decided, that our organ- 
ism has "stored-up reserves of energy that are 
ordinarily not called upon, but that may be called 
upon: deeper and deeper strata of combustible or 
explosible material . . . repairing themselves by 
rest as well as do the superficial strata." 

He compares our energy-budget to our nutritive 
budget. "Physiologists say that a man is in 'nutri- 
tive equilibrium' when day after day he neither 
gains nor loses weight. But the odd thing is that 
this condition may obtain on astonishingly different 
amounts of food. Take a man in nutritive equili- 



140 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

brium, and systematically increase or lessen his 
rations. In the first case he will begin to gain 
weight, in the second case to lose it. The change 
will be greatest on the first day, less on the second, 
still less on the third; and so on, till he has gained 
all that he will gain, or lost all that he will lose, on 
that altered diet. He is now in nutritive equilibrium 
again, but with a new weight; and this neither 
lessens nor increases because his various combus- 
tion-processes have adjusted themselves to the 
changed dietary. . . . 

"Just so one can be in what I might call 'effic- 
iency-equilibrium' (neither gaining nor losing 
power when once the equilibrium is reached) on 
astonishingly different quantities of work, no 
matter in what direction the work may be measured. 
It may be physical work, intellectual work, moral 
work, or spiritual work. 

"Of course," he admits, "there are limits : the 
trees don't grow into the sky. . . . But the very 
same individual, pushing his energies to their 
extreme, may in a vast number of cases keep the 
pace up day after day, and find no 'reaction' of a 
bad sort, so long as decent hygienic conditions are 
preserved." 

These are astonishing statements ; approaching, 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 141 

if true, a veritable revelation. But James goes on 
to illustrate the truth of his statement on a whole- 
sale scale: 

"Country people and city people, as a class, illus- 
trate this difference. The rapid rate of life, the 
number of decisions in an hour, the many things 
to keep account of, in a busy city man's or woman's 
life, seem monstrous to a country brother. He 
doesn't see how we live at all. A day in New York 
or Chicago fills him with terror. The danger and 
noise make it appear like a permanent earthquake. 
But settle him there, and in a year or two he will 
have caught the pulse-beat. He will vibrate to the 
city's rhythms; and if he only succeeds in his 
avocation, whatever that may be, he will find a joy 
in all the hurry and the tension, he will keep the 
pace as well as any of us, and get as much out of 
himself in any week as he ever did in ten weeks 
in the country. . . . 

"The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one : 
the new level of energy becomes permanent." 

How are we to produce these marvellous results? 
How are we to draw on our vast unused powers 
and make them available? How are we to keep 
ourselves going at the highest efficient speed on 
all six cylinders, instead of idling along, knocking 



142 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

on one, losing compression on another, and missing 
on three? 

In the instance of the country folk in the city, 
the stimuli of those who successfully respond and 
undergo the transformation, are, in James's words, 
"the example of others, and crowd-pressure and 
contagion." There is also duty. "The duties of 
new offices of trust are constantly producing this 
effect on the human beings appointed to them." 

But there are other stimuli than these for bring- 
ing out our latent resources. I cannot quote all 
the inspiring examples which James cites to show 
the diverse ways in which the resources have been 
drawn on, but I can summarize the "stimuli" which 
he credits for them. They include, in addition to 
those just mentioned: excitements, ideas, efforts, 
love, anger, religious crises, love-crises, indignation- 
crises, despair in some cases, the suppression of 
"fearthought," which is the "self-suggestion of in- 
feriority" (phrases he borrows from Horace 
Fletcher), systematic ascetism, "beginning with easy 
tasks, passing to harder ones, and exercising day 
by day." 

Finally he adds: "The normal opener of deeper 
and deeper levels of energy is the will. The diffi- 
culty is to use it, to make the effort which the 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 143 

word 'volition' implies. ... It is notorious that 
a single successful effort of moral volition, such 
as saying 'no' to some habitual temptation, or per- 
forming some courageous act, will launch a man 
on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, 
will give him a new range of power. 'In the act 
of uncorking the whiskey bottle which I had 
brought home to get drunk upon,' said a man to 
me, 'I suddenly found myself running out into the 
garden, where I smashed it on the ground. I felt 
so happy and uplifted after this act, that for two 
months I wasn't tempted to touch a drop.' " 

There is one stimulus to breaking down the 
fatigue-barriers which James, though he occasion- 
ally appears to get close to it, does not mention. It 
is a very important stimulus. In fact, I am quite 
prepared to call it the most important of them all. 
It is sometimes derivative; and includes, in part, 
one or two of the stimuli already referred to. This 
stimulus is intensity of interest. 

Interest, excitement, absorption in the pursuit of 
an object, make you forget yourself and your dis- 
comforts. A man who is so tired out from the day 
at the office that he cannot read his newspaper on 
the subway, who brings home some work and is 
too tired to understand it after dinner, though he 



144 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

makes several attempts and several fresh starts to 
"get his mind down to it," may none the less turn 
to a detective story, and follow the course of its 
characters, the clues, the shrewd mental workings 
of the detective, trying to anticipate his deductions 
and conclusions, all with the most intense concen- 
tration and the highest relish. He may feel too 
worn out mentally to sit home and read a con- 
sular report on a matter of interest to his business, 
a report containing no long chains of reasoning nor 
a single subtle statement; yet he will not feel too 
tired to dress for the theatre and enjoy a Shaw 
comedy to the full, with one clever and subtle 
epigram touching off another like a package of fire- 
crackers. A stupid office boy will show intelligence 
about baseball and professional boxing gossip. The 
explanation in each case is simply a difference in 
interest. 

This principle in the mental field applies quite 
as strongly in the physical. A man who would be 
completely tired out if he beat a rug for his wife, 
will play five sets of tennis of an afternoon, absorb- 
ing ten times as much physical energy. The first 
is "work," the second "pl a )'-" Every soldier is 
familiar with the immense difference it makes to 
him whether he is drilling with or without music: 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 145 

in the first case his step is lighter, his heart is 
lighter, his rifle is lighter; his fatigue is half gone. 
Modern gymnasiums are beginning to recognize this 
effect by giving their calisthenic exercises to the 
music of a piano or a phonograph. But both drill- 
ing and calisthenics are considered "work," and the 
principle is still better illustrated at a dance, where 
a man is quite unconscious (unless his partner is 
awkward or unattractive) that he is working. 
Every man who has ever adventured upon a ball- 
room floor can tell 370U how much better he can 
dance, how much more uncontrollable is his craving 
to dance, how much longer he can dance, with 
good music than with bad. A man will go to 
a social affair, and he will dance and dance; 
he will be there for every encore; he will clap 
and clap for more; and when the affair is over, 
and the strains of "Home, Sweet Home" have 
sent him home in spite of himself, he will fall into a 
taxicab in a state of utter collapse; and when he 
is arrived home, will scarcely have the energy to 
undress for bed. He will finally be in bed at any- 
where from half past one to half past three in the 
morning. But let him stay in the office till after 
midnight, let him "work" till half past one or half 
past three in the morning, and till the end of his life 



146 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

he will never have done telling about that prodigy of 
accomplishment. 

The same principle which applies to the common 
man applies to the genius. It may sometimes even 
appear to make a common man into a genius. The 
histories of philosophy and science abound with 
examples of thinkers apparently apathetic and in- 
dolent by nature, but who, once upon the scent of 
a new and original theory or discovery, have bent 
themselves to an enormous and astounding amount 
of thinking and reading and experimenting and fact- 
collecting. The infinite patience and industry of 
Darwin, once he had hit upon the idea of biological 
evolution and the struggle for survival, and the 
change of Herbert Spencer from indolence to ambi- 
tion, once he had glimpsed evolution as a universal 
law, applying not only to the body, but to the mind, 
to nations, to social and economic institutions, to 
language, to the stars, to morals, to manners, to 
beliefs and theories, and the marvellous erudition 
which he acquired in gathering all these facts and 
weaving them into a gigantic system of twenty 
volumes of philosophy in spite of the grave handi- 
caps of poor finances and poor health, — these are 
but two examples out of hundreds that might be 
cited. 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 147 

The common idea that geniuses as a rule are 
lazy, with a distinct aversion for work in general, 
is one of the greatest of untruths. The untruth 
has its origin in the fact that geniuses usually have 
an aversion toward the particular kind of work 
which their fathers or the world would set them to. 
The father would set the son up in some respectable 
profession, make him a minister, a lawyer, a stock- 
broker, or have him succeed the father as head of 
the tin-plate mills; but the genius will have none 
of it. He is neither docile nor tractable; he will 
forge his own path. But, if he be a true genius, 
then once he has struck that path, which natural 
inclination, nay, which every fibre of his being 
demands that he follow, his industry and pertinacity 
will make that of your average respectable business 
man look like the merest dawdling. If Goethe had 
been lazy, could he have turned out sixty volumes? 
Could Defoe have turned out two hundred and ten? 
Could Shakespeare, greatest of them all, have turned 
out thirty-seven plays and acted in them ? Take any 
classic writer of fiction, Scott or Dickens or Dumas 
or Dostoevsky, and recall what an imposing thing- 
is the "complete works" of any one of them when 
gathered in uniform binding! Could indolent men 
have wrought these things? 



148 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

We may consider even the classic examples of 
literary indolence — Samuel Johnson, let us say. He 
usually wrote only when spurred on by the need of 
money, and then only enough to keep himself and 
his wife from starving. After he was pensioned 
by the king, he indulged his natural sloth by lying 
in bed until mid-day and after. Yet he carried on 
his magazine, the Rambler, twice-a-week for two 
years single-handed; he produced eight volumes of 
essays, many volumes of biographies, and his im- 
mense Dictionary; and to pay for his mother's 
funeral, wrote Rasselas in eight nights. It is evi- 
dent that when Johnson once set himself to a task, 
his powers of sustained concentration were such as 
only the rarest mortals can equal. 

What we find in literature, we find in every other 
art. A lazy Michael Angelo could not have built 
St. Peters, to say nothing of his other works. A 
lazy Beethoven or Mozart could not have composed 
the number of works that these men did. Franz 
Schubert, known for his easy-going Bohemian life, 
always out of funds, always care free, yet managed 
to turn out several overtures, eight symphonies, and 
six hundred songs! 

The catalog does not end with literature and the 
arts. Napoleon was such a gourmand for work 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 149 

that he could frequently spare only four hours a 
night for sleep, and sometimes went without that. 
Thomas A. Edison is perhaps the greatest inventor 
that the world has ever seen. By either inventing 
or improving the electric light, the phonograph, the 
telephone, the moving picture, and patenting hun- 
dreds of other inventions, he has done more than 
any single man to make our present-day material 
civilization what it is. Yet, though now in his 
seventies, he hardly ever takes a holiday, sleeps only 
four consecutive hours, and works at all hours of the 
day and night. One could go on and on. 

And how are these prodigious achievements 
possible? Geniuses and artists do not doggedly 
drag themselves through their work. That is not 
their attitude toward it. They get so much work 
done because the work they do is their play, their 
recreation, their passion. 

And it is so because of their intensity of interest. 
"Warming up to one's work," as cited by James, 
and the manner in which "the mind grows heated," 
as expressed by Goethe, are simply ways of saying 
that though you may broach your work without 
interest and without enthusiasm, you are gradually 
or suddenly seized by an interest, which up to a 
certain point continues to mount. With the genius 



150 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

this interest is greater than with the common man. 
As psychologists have pointed out, a man is not a 
genius because he concentrates more than the ordi- 
nary man; he concentrates more because he is a 
genius. His ideas overflow; they come with such 
rapidity, they change the aspects of his subject 
with such kaleidoscopic variety, they throw so many 
new and interesting and dazzling lights upon it, that 
his attention is sustained by following them. The 
dullard, no matter how much of a plugger he may 
be, finds the utmost difficulty in sticking to any train 
of thought of his own, because his mind will produce 
only hackneyed and barren ideas, hardly worth 
attending to. 

The problem, then, in all creative work, is to 
seek to sustain the interest at the highest pitch, 
never allowing it to flag. As long as the interest 
is intense enough, physical and mental fatigue will 
not greatly matter. Eight times out of nine it is 
flagging interest, rather than real fatigue, which 
makes us quit. The phenomenon might be repre- 
sented on a chart by two lines or curves, such as 
the political economists use for "demand curves" 
and "supply curves." Starting at the top, and 
slanting downward, (or starting low, mounting 
higher, and then curving down again) would be a 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 151 

curve or an irregular up and down line representing 
interest. Starting at the bottom and slanting up- 
ward, would be a curve or irregular line represent- 
ing fatigue. At some point these two lines would 
meet; and that would be the point at which you 
would ordinarily quit. 

There are two ways to put off this point. If, by 
diversification, by turning from one subject to 
another, by changing the aspects considered even 
of a single subject, you can sustain or increase your 
interest, then the top line representing interest will 
not go down to meet the line representing fatigue; 
the fatigue line will have further to go, higher to 
mount; the point of intersection may be surpris- 
ingly postponed. 

But if the two lines do meet, you have still a 
recourse, if you care to use it. That is your will. 
You can fight through the point by sheer effort, 
trusting that after a time either the upper interest 
line will rise again or the lower fatigue line will 
fall, allowing you another spell of achievement; 
and so on through other points of intersection. 
"Heroism," said W. T. Grenfell, "is endurance for 
one moment more." 

I shall be told that this is a very dangerous 
doctrine, that if put into practice it would lead to 



152 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

overwork, overstrain, and nervous breakdown. It 
is possible to overdo it; but I am convinced that 
for the overwhelming majority of those who read 
this, there is not the slightest danger of such a 
thing happening. Most breakdowns attributed to 
overwork do not come from overwork, but from 
worry, dissipation and unhygienic living. Indolence 
will always find excuses for its own existence ; and 
the greatest of these has always been, and will 
always be, this bogey of "overwork." 



XVI 

MORAL COURAGE 

T MUST extend a few warnings before we part, 
-*• and I can do it briefly. 

Never boast to your friends about your will- 
power. They are apt to become cynical and face- 
tious, especially when you have broken some major 
or minor resolution in a fit of absent-mindedness. 
You want your friends to know of your will-power, 
but the best way for them to discover it will be 
through your actions, not your words. 

Don't, (O Don't) be a prig. A prig is a person 
who has become vastly well satisfied with himself. 
His chief pastime is to fill the air with lamentations 
over the shortcomings of other people. He is satis- 
fied with himself because he is so easily satisfied. 
He is the little Jack Horner who says, "What a 
good boy am I !" A prig's mind dwells on his suc- 
cesses and on what he has accomplished. Now true 
will-power is perfectly compatible with true humil- 
ity, and a man of true humility dwells on his short- 

153 



154 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

comings and on what he has failed to accomplish. 
The prig is satisfied with himself because in his 
own eye he is realizing his ideals; but one of the 
reasons for this is simply that his ideals are low 
enough to make it easy to realize them. A man of 
true humility puts his ideal always a little beyond 
his reach. A prig, for instance, takes credit to him- 
self because he reads good books. The man who 
is destined to grow criticizes himself because, though 
he reads good books, he does not think enough for 
himself. A prig admires himself because he has 
given $5 to the Red Cross. A true man, in the 
same financial circumstances, may be a little 
ashamed of himself because he has only given $15. 

Things of a similar tenor have been said before. 
"It is in general more profitable," says Carlyle, "to 
reckon up our defects than to boast of our attain- 
ments." And the words of Phillips Brooks are 
more thrilling : "Sad is the day for any man when 
he becomes absolutely satisfied with the life that 
he is living, the thoughts that he is thinking and the 
deeds that he is doing; when there ceases to be 
forever beating at the doors of his soul a desire to 
do something larger, which he feels and knows he 
was meant and intended to do." 

To resume our admonitions. Don't try to be a 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 155 

"dominating personality" by shouting down your 
opponents or co-workers. Will-power has no neces- 
sary connection with noise. 

Don't be stubborn. Especially don't be stubborn 
in your social recreations, under the impression that 
that is will-power. Don't say, "We will play 
bridge," whether anybody else wants to or not. 
Don't "break up the party" just because it won't 
play your way. Don't fancy that will-power is in- 
compatible with making yourself agreeable. 

The difference between stubbornness and back- 
bone you may imagine to be merely a difference in 
invective. A man who stands for principles in 
which you believe, has backbone ; a man who stands 
for principles in which you do not believe, is 
stubborn. But the true difference, as I conceive it, 
is that the stubborn man will not listen to reason. 
He will persist in a course he has adopted simply to 
maintain his vanity. He won't admit that he has 
been wrong, though he may know it in his heart. 
His notion of will-power is sadly false. Will-power 
is consentaneous to the utmost spirit of concilia- 
tion. This does not mean compromise. The man 
with backbone is willing to listen to argument ; he 
will keep his mind open. But he will not deviate 
an inch in principle if he knows himself to be right. 



156 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

He will give in before convincing argument; he is 
big enough to admit that he can make mistakes, 
and even that he has made one in this particular 
instance. But he will never give in because of mere 
lack of physical and moral courage. 

And moral courage is the rarest of all the rare 
things of this earth. The war has shown that 
millions have physical courage. Millions were 
willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, 
poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust 
themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in 
air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns and the 
machine guns of enemy planes; to go into sub- 
marines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But 
how many had the courage merely to make them- 
selves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: 
that many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both 
sides of the conflict not because they were con- 
vinced that they were helping to save the world, 
not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, 
not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't 
the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" 
or "conscientious objector." 

Perhaps it would be unwise to take for granted 
that the passions of the war have completely cooled, 
and possibly many would miss the point if I were 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 157 

to discuss this question from the point of view of 
our own side. But let us look at it from the Ger- 
man side. The Germans surely had physical cour- 
age. Not all of them shouted "Kamerad," or if 
they did, it is rather strange that it took a world in 
arms more than four years to defeat them. But 
how many had moral courage in Germany? How 
many dared, like Maximilien Harden, to lift their 
voices against the dominant German creed, and how 
high dared he lift his? Fear of death? No; the 
soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared un- 
popularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their 
fellows. 

What was needed in war is needed no less ur- 
gently in peace. How many persons in public or 
even in private life have the courage to say the thing 
that people do not like to hear ? The ancient Greeks 
were not a superior race of people, but in the little 
city of Athens, in a period covering only a few 
hundred years, there came forth thinkers the splen- 
dor of whose fame has not been paralleled, cer- 
tainly not exceeded, in all the nations of the world 
in all the thousands of years that have come since 
then. Where is the modern triumvirate of philos- 
ophers that is greater than Aristotle, Socrates and 
Plato? There may have been a number of reasons 



158 THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 

that brought this flowering of Greek culture, but 
one of them was this : that thought in Greece was 
free. A man could arrive at an opinion on a fun- 
damental question different from that of his fel- 
lows without bringing himself into contempt. For 
a thousand years after Aristotle there were no 
thinkers; and the reason was, that thinking for 
oneself was despised. The authority of Aristotle 
was absolute. It applied not only to what he had 
positively said, but to what he had omitted to say. 
If it was not in Aristotle, it did not exist. When, 
in time, a few great spirits began to think for them- 
selves, they faced a bitter struggle. Galileo, sup- 
porting the discovery of Copernicus that the earth 
revolved around the sun, and not the sun around 
the earth, was compelled publicly to repudiate it. 
Bacon had to plead against the authority of Aris- 
totle. Locke had to write : "Some will not admit 
an opinion not authorized by men of old, who were 
then all giants in knowledge. Nothing is to be put 
into the treasury of truth or knowledge which has 
not the stamp of Greece or Rome upon it, and since 
their days will scarce allow that men have been 
able to see, think or write." 

What can it profit a man to be able to think, if 
he does not dare to? One must have the courage 



THE WAY TO WILL-POWER 159 

to go where the mind leads, no matter how startling 
the conclusion, how shattering, how much it may 
hurt oneself or a particular class, no matter how 
unfashionable or how obnoxious it may at first seem. 
This may require the courage to stand against the 
whole world. Great is the man who has that courage, 
for he indeed has achieved will-power. 



THE END. 






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